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Paul Boag wears reading glasses and gloves

In Boagworld podcast episode 130, I discovered that in order to help test web accessibility, Paul Boag wears glasses (that he doesn’t need) and gloves and attempts to navigate through a site. Excellent idea!

In order to better understand [the elderly’s] experience I have bought a pair to ski gloves and some reading glasses (I don’t need reading glasses). Every now and again, I surf the site I am designing wearing both the glasses and gloves. The glasses make the screen hard to read while the gloves hamper my use of the mouse and the keyboard. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to select something from a drop down menu wearing ski gloves!

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browser text visual

Don’t Use Text Resizing Widgets

Web sites should not implement text resizing widgets–you know, those little buttons, usually an “A+” and “A-” that increase/descrease the size of the text on the site. The responsibility for providing this functionality lies with the browser, like the forward and back buttons.

Web designers/owners need to put forth more effort in teaching/guiding the user to using the browsers’ features for text resizing. Equally, the browsers themselves should make this feature more obvious and usable.

In addition, most sites I see that use resizing widgets are not very accessible; they seem to add this feature as a cheap replacement (bluff, excuse) for a genuinely accessible web site.

More:

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captcha hearing impairment visual

Petition Asks Yahoo to Fix Their CAPTCHA

The Blind Access Journal has a good blog post Petition Asks Yahoo to Tear Down “No Blind People Allowed” Sign.

Read that, or just go straight to the Yahoo’s Accessibility Improvement petition and sign it to support web accessibility! I’m #710.

You can also learn more about accessible CAPTCHA on the Web Axe podcast from a few months back.

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Amazon.com and NFB

If you haven’t heard yet, Amazon.com stated that they are now committed to making improvements to web site accessibility. After Amazon.com has been singled out for its lack of web accessibility, let’s hope they can make up for it. The online retail giant will reportedly be working with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) to make its web site more accessible.

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audio cognitive impairment motor podcast visual

About Impairments and Assistive Technology

Dennis explains some types of disabilites and different kinds of tools used to help access the web.

Download Web Axe Episode 25 (About Impairments and Assistive Technology)

[Transcript for Episode 25]

Disability Types:

Alternative Devices: