Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that accessibility is only about the blind people with physical disabilities, and forget about those with cognitive difficulties, or those who are new to the Web. Many pages are very busy and confusing and hence off-putting.

Flame-haired DOMscripting lovegod Christian Heillman, has been experimenting with easy-to-use photo viewer for Flickr and an easy YouTube player.

He’s also provided documentation:

• YouTube player docs
• Flickr docs

Groovy—and great to see the area of cognitive accessibility being addressed.

Your Replies

#1 On August 2nd, 2008 12:01 pm Laura Landy replied:

Really appreciate expanding the boundaries of “accessibility” to include beginners and cognitively impaired users. Even I, a baby boomer advanced user, get frustrated in some web2 sites. Language and visual/interactive paradigms have changed dramatically since I started doing web work back in the late 90′s.

Yes, interactivity experiences have improved exponentially since then. But that is in large part due to new generations who grew up with computers, gaming, surfing and networking over the internet. They’ve developed a whole new visual and interactive language that makes many assumptions about user familiarity with these emerging paradigms.

Simplification of interfaces and interactions have increased overall usability for all. But the underlying assumption that the user knows the new language of terminology, visual parsing based on labels, placement, iconic representation, etc has raised the threshold for prerequisite user experience.

This assumption presents barriers to those who fall below this threshold–older generations, cognitively impaired, economically or culturally barred from exposure to technology, etc. I believe this is one of the underrepresented issues addressed by the accessibility/usability community, although it has been coming to the forefront with the sustainability movement.

Thanks again.

PS: I did find one issue with rendering; it’s an ubiquitous one. When the text size is increased, the content bleeds over the edges of the background graphic. Sometimes this ok if the text and background color have sufficient contrast, but many times, similarity in colore and intensity create legibility. This brings us to the thorny problem of using static background images…

#2 On August 7th, 2008 2:53 am Kreuzfahrten replied:

Very well then! Well done, there are many people who are just confused of the plentitude of some websites. Some pages seem to consist only of ads, others confound the users with extra small font sizes. I really admire older people who handle the internet easily, but some need help and with the \”easy to\” players.
I appreciate every bargain that raises the accesibility to the internet, because the collected knowledge of the entire world should not be restricted to several groups. There is no valuable commodity than knowledge.
As long as people think altruisticly it is not as bad as all that.
Laura, I totally agree with you and appreciate your well sophisticated suggestions.

#3 On September 16th, 2008 6:00 pm Diablo replied:

Quote
Very well then! Well done, there are many people who are just confused of the plentitude of some websites. Some pages seem to consist only of ads, others confound the users with extra small font sizes. I really admire older people who handle the internet easily, but some need help and with the \”easy to\” players.
I appreciate every bargain that raises the accesibility to the internet, because the collected knowledge of the entire world should not be restricted to several groups. There is no valuable commodity than knowledge.
As long as people think altruisticly it is not as bad as all that.
Laura, I totally agree with you and appreciate your well sophisticated suggestions. Quote-end

I agree with you completely.Espcially Youtube player would be cool.

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