Blog posts tagged with the following topic: "accessibility"
What is it like to use a screen reader on an inaccessible website?
Excerpt:
Screen readers are amazing things. But they can be difficult learn and use.
When we see with our eyes, we see in 3 dimensions. We can look up, down, left and right, and we can look a things close to us or in the distance.
Almost all websites are 2 dimensional. You can position content top to bottom and left to right.
A screen reader really can only view a website in 1 dimension. It's features are linear. It removes all of the visual positioning, lines all of the content up, then it navigates through it from start to finish.
Ok, this maybe should have been called one-page-applications are rarely accessible. Anything can be made accessible, it just takes a lot of effort, and very few people put the effort in.
One-page-applications are on the rise. With them you get funky animations and cool transition effects. Some are a real beauty to behold.
The biggest problem with one-page-applications, is they often create a terrible experience for people using screen readers.
As designers, we always like to put our stamp on things. We like to make things fancy and show off our full range of talents. Then when it comes to coding them up, we abuse our design!
We float things right. We use absolute positioning. We style links to look like buttons. We use fancy hover states and chuck in break tags in to create whitespace.
Then, we marvel at how pretty our designs look. After all, as long as it looks good, that's all that matters. Right?
There's a common misconception that people using assistive technologies are an edge case. That they fall into that 1% where people disable Javascript. But, this couldn't be further from the truth.
I'm going to show you why it's important to make your website accessible.