8th Entry

This weeks lecture was on accessibility and how people with disabilities access resources on a computer. Accessibility is a very important subject that is often overlooked. As someone who has designed many websites, I was always aware but wasn’t that concerned about designing for people with disabilities because I always thought software would always be able to cater for their needs but this is not always the case. Legislation for making websites accessible for disabled people and the W3 accessibility guidelines have been in place for quite some time but I never bothered with them because they were a little excessive and no one else seemed to be bothering with them either so I was quite surprised to hear that disability pressure groups have started suing companies who do not abide by them.

Software can do a lot for people with disabilities including magnifying the text, changing the colour scheme of applications and websites for people with sight problems such as blindness or colour-blindness and providing voice recognition. It can also read text out loud on a website using a special text only browser. However while software can provide this companies need to insure their websites are compatible. A company has made a validator called Bobby so a company can check to see if their website would be accessible for people with disabilities. Some plugins, JavaScript frames and columns can all make a website difficult for a screen reader to read.

Hardware has also been created for people with disabilities including a panel that turns text to brail using pins and a keyboard for someone with only one hand.

To finish off we watched Animator Vs Animation II, incredibly to managed to be even better than the first, absolute pure genius!

This lecture has been very thought provoking. I never knew accessibility was such a big industry and I’m really surprised to find companies are even being sued for inaccessible websites. I’ll definitely keep accessibility in mind when I design websites and applications in the future. At the bottom of this blog entry are a few links I used to research the accessibility guidelines.

This weeks tutorial was about creating tweens within tweens with Flash. It basically involved tweening a symbol that already had a tween combined with it. It’s definitely getting more complex now but I’m enjoying discovering more of Flash’s features. You really need to think about what you want to achieve before you start creating the animation since the process of making the animation takes quite a while to complete and it can be difficult to edit at the end since your using so many different components.

1. W3’s accessibility guidelines -
http://www.w3.org/WAI/gettingstarted/Overview.html

2. Information about the Disability Discrimination Act - http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/uk-website-legal-requirements.shtml

3. General information regarding accessibility – http://www.tiresias.org/guidelines/web.htm