Web Accessibility for Indian designers- Part 1 - Disability Defined
Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web and providing flexibility to accommodate each user’s needs and preferences. There are guidelines that need to be followed to make your website accessible. But accessibility is a very rare term in India where 22 million (2.2 crore) people are disabled, and most of the disabled have none or very few of the facilities available to be used in their daily lives. These include ramps for wheelchairs, pavements beside the roads, etc.
The disability we are talking about is different. What we are talking about does not include all forms of disabilities. The types of disabilities we the designers have to keep in mind are visual, audible, epilepsy, etc. what I feel is that we the designers should not be one of the people who show discrimination to the disabled people, by making web un-accessible to them.
Human Physical Disabilities
Visually disabled users
There are about 11million disabled people in India, that’s about 1.01% of Indian population. To disregard these many people is foolishness. The visually disabled people constitute blind people as well as other forms of aliments like poor eye sight, color blinded ness etc. you may ask how will blind people use the net. Well there are special voice readers that go through the page and reads out the contents. The lack of ability to resize the text that has been fixed to a particular font size in the page makes the page inaccessible for poor site users. And the affinity of Indian designers to use lot of bright colors, with utter regard to contrast ratio, will make it inaccessible to color blinded people.
Deaf users
There is lot of content on the web which is in the form of audio. For example if a designer put in an audio content or a flash movie embedded in page with a voiceover or music in it, it will be an obvious problem for the deaf users.
Other physical disabilities
There are epileptic people who need to avoid flickering pictures or text, else it might give them seizures. These flickering ads were quite common few years back; we can still see them now once in a while. People with impaired motor skills (someone who cannot readily type or use a mouse) are not able to click on a link that is too small or which is over an image map that is poorly designed.
Disability of the machines
JavaScript disabled
Almost 7% of people who use internet don’t have the JavaScript turned on either due to disabling the popup ads, and few of the text only browsers doesn’t support JavaScript at all.
Mobile disabled
Most of the websites doesn’t show up on your mobile or PDA because it was not designed to show up. Most of the websites have large images, flash, or JavaScript that the mobile device does not support. There are very few WAP enabled websites that are currently available.
Mouse or keyboard disabled
Few of the computers have either the mouse that has been not working properly or a keyboard which has few of the buttons not working. Designers have to make sure their websites are accessible even if either the mouse or keyboard is not working properly.
Bandwidth disability
This is one of the most important factors which the designers have to keep in mind while designing for clients in India. In a country where 64kbps speed is considered broadband most of the users I think have either their images turned off or might opt for text only browsers like Lynx. So it almost a must to design accessible websites in you want to target Indian audience.
Usage at a internet cafe
Almost every one in India had to go through the horror of using the internet either in a internet cafe or in a kiosks. The utter anguish one feels as the page shows half of the contents as few of the plugins are missing is common for us. Most of the cafes have many of the plugins not installed at all. To add to that one have to cope with 800*600 resolution monitors, with key board disabled with few of the keys not working, or with a mouse which has some hair stuck in it’s wheel.
These are few of the disabilities that one has to keep in mind to make accessible websites and to get the huge chunk of population that has been neglected for years. This is first of few articles I will be writing on accessibility. I will try to cover topics from lack of accessibility guidelines for the government of India, to the common ways we the designers that we can incorporate in our practices to make accessible website. I think it doesn’t take much from us to make our work accessible to all, just some 2% of additional work and a bit of common sense.
