Comments on: Is accessibility only about people with disabilities?

By: iheni

iheni — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:30:53 +0000

Helmers - a couple of things that accessibility helps beyond disabled users that may in turn help your business case for accessibility: 1. The cross over with mobile 2. Better internationalisation / localisation of content 3. Helps older users 4. Better usability 5. Business case from Legal and General 8. Developing an accessibility business case for your organisation

By: Helmers

Helmers — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:50:20 +0000

I think it is great when we can use standards to make our stuff easily accessible. I would love some guidance on how accesibility fits with the other aspects of designing for the web. I do not want accesibility to be a moral high horse that can be climbed and used to ride past other aspects of good design.

By: iheni

iheni — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:59:33 +0000

Hi Sveta, thanks for your comments. I agree that accessibility for deaf users is transcripts and captions for multimedia but I would go a bit further and say that clear copy, layout, use of colour to reinforce meaning, clear iconography, images and headings also help.

Many deaf people since birth, people who are culturally deaf, have British Sign Language (or their native country equivalent) as their native language so written text is not always the easiest to understand.
Lisa Herrod, accessibility and usability specialist, has extensive experience in this area and wrote a great article for A List Apart “Deafness and the User Experience” http://www.alistapart.com/articles/deafnessandtheuserexperience/ Most definitely worth a read.

By: Sveta

Sveta — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 03:49:54 +0000

For me as a deaf user accessibility means text versions for all audio media. Which brings me to the question to Martin Kliehm who posted his comment in end of March and said transcripts would follow eventually. I still don’t see transcripts. They are to be posted with audio AT SAME TIME not after.

To make content equally available, it’s best that videos and podcasts are to be put online along with transcripts, not before transcripts are ready.

By: Martin Kliehm

Martin Kliehm — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:40:00 +0000

This was also a topic at the European Accessibility Forum Frankfurt in a panel with Henny, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, and Tomas Caspers. The video is now at Vimeo, sign language and transcripts will follow eventually.