In the early days of the web, sites were largely text based. Crawling onto the web was an exercise in reading one glowing page of text after another and marveling at how, by clicking on certain highlighted words, you could find additional information on another glowing page of text located on the other side of the world. Things are different now. Today it is possible to navigate entire sites by reading no more than a handful of words. Users have grown accustomed to rich and varied content with images as the currency of navigation.
But when users cannot see these images, navigation is far more difficult; the site may be totally inaccessible. Back when web pages were all text, screen reading programs for the visually impaired could get to the information just about as easily as any other web browser. Now, however, information content is dispersed among words, pictures, sounds and video. If a screen reader can identify the text, it may read words out of sequence since sentences have been chopped up to improve "page layout." As most seeing users will attest, good layout makes for inviting reading. However, as Norman Coombs has stated, "Page layout doesn't mean much to the blind." Accessible content needs to be of higher priority.
So how is one to get the content and hopefully the context of information on today's sites? Even if a user has a powerful assistive technology program, namely one that interprets text and page layout to the extent that it stitches words back into sentences, users still miss out on the content in graphics and in video. In order to get around these issues, we need to design web pages with accessibility in mind from the beginning. And all of the content needs to be accessible through multiple channels.
At the very least the content needs to be text-based, and current web page standards have taken this into consideration. When developers place pictures onto a web page, they may be asked for alternate text for these images. This is not where developers name or comment on the picture; this is where they describe what is in the picture. They must imagine they are trying to describe the image to a friend over the phone. This is the amount of detail that needs to be included on a page for each picture used.
Some images merely serve as "eye-candy" performing no other function than to fluff up the visual experience of a page. These images can be labeled with a single space so that a screen reader will not leave a reader wondering what purpose that unlabelled picture served. Developers who choose to include video on a web page find it helpful to have a link to the transcript of the video or even better to a SAP (Secondary Audio Program) that includes DVS (Descriptive Video Services.) A reader describes what is happening on the screen, not just what is said. Imagine describing for a friend over the phone what is happening on a TV show while she is at work and can't watch firsthand. In the world of sports broadcasting, such a description is known as color commentary – yet another vision-centric metaphor for the unseen.
Other disabilities benefit from this duplication of content across
multiple channels. A deaf person can still see the video and now can
read a narration. And persons with cognitive disabilities, especially
those that limit attention span, can watch a video, see the text, and
hear the text all at once. Information is presented with multiple
channels and these channels increase the ability to concentrate on that
information by blocking out other input. As technology advances,
creating multiple files in order to provide multiple channels of
presentation is becoming less and less needed. Already, current
technology can read text from the screen and speech recognition
technologies promise to reverse this process and make it possible to
create text from the spoken word.
By following the idea of universal accommodation for one disability, a web site becomes accessible to a broad range of persons with disabilities.