Attention: The law demands that companies produce information in an accessible format in accordance with the Disability Discrimination Act (1995). This has implications for websites, which good practice suggests should be designed in such a way as not to discriminate against any disabilities.
Blindness and partial blindness
It is a misconception that a blind person cannot use the Internet.
Blindness not only covers full sight loss in both eyes, but partial loss of vision in one or both eyes and incorrectible vision in one or both eyes.
People with these conditions will find it difficult to view any website.
Low vision impairment
Low vision impairment can affect a variety of people. The young and the old are usually the most common candidates for this condition, as the eyes are still developing at a young age and can deteriorate at an older age.
People with low vision impairment often find small text difficult to read, low contrasting colours hard to distinguish and may struggle to read and understand ‘fancy’ or ‘complex’ fonts, such as novelty fonts or type that has varied heights, styles or serifs.
Color blindness
Color blindness is the most common visual disability. It is a condition that makes it difficult to distinguish between certain colors. The most common colors that this form of blindness affects are red and green.
Once you understand the needs of visually impaired audiences, you can start to think of ways to build websites that reduce the impact the impairments may cause.
It is important to attain a high standard of design and development for website design and even more important to implement the following rules when designing for the visually impaired.
CSS website design
It is important to have a text-based website. If you need to use images and other media, use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to implement the effects.
Good website designers should be able to remove a style sheet and see nothing but good quality text that is ordered in an expectant flow, broken into segments using horizontal rules.
CSS is also good for text web browsers. Unlike Microsoft® Internet Explorer and Mozilla® Firefox, text web browsers only show text and disregard images, audio, Flash and any other non-text media. This enhances the text for screen-reading software, an essential requirement for people with visual disabilities.
Use of colors
When designing for the Internet, there is a selection of colors called web safe colors that should be used. This ensures that the screen that the website is viewed on reproduces the hues and tones as accurately as possible.
It is, however, now standard practice for designers to think about visual disabilities:
Use of fonts
- When designing, do not use low contrasting colors; black on purple is low contrasting and difficult to view correctly. Red on white or black on white is the highest contrast, making it easier to view.
- Do not put two low contrast colors adjacent to each other. A red stripe beside a green stripe is too much of a blur for the eyes and would impact anything in front of these colors.
Fonts are another design aspect that have been considered for years. Fonts need to be considered when designing because:
a) Not many fonts are web compatible – this means that few computer systems have the same fonts
b) Unusual fonts are difficult to read and need to be generated using images, which is poor design practice for web accessibility standards
Example of fonts that have been used on the Internet include:
When designing with accessibility in mind, it is important to use sans serif fonts or monospace fonts. These types of fonts are clear to read and are readable in small and large font sizes.
- Arial (sans serif)
- Times New Roman (serif)
- Comic Sans (cursive)
- Courier (monospace)
Using a separate style sheet for print is another good idea. Changing fonts to a serif (e.g. Times New Roman) will be better for reading after printing.
There are, however, other ways to achieve different fonts.
Images, such as .gif or .jpg can be created to make text for a website. This means that any font the designer has, the user can read within the image even if they don’t have that font installed on their own computer.
It is important to remember that some browsers may not view images (such as text web browsers) and many people with visual disabilities may find it difficult to read the fonts that have been added to an image.
Images should rarely be used for text, as it increases the document size (images are usually larger than standard HTML text) and text within images cannot be selected like HTML text.
Image hyperlinks are also harder to distinguish, as they often do not have a state that changes when the mouse rolls over the image
