Web Design for the Visually Impaired
A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Raj Rao
Should We Create Web Design for the Visually Impaired?
Web Design can make an important contribution to the Internet users who are visually impaired.
There is a large number of users on the Internet who have some type of visual impairment. This could be either blind, partially sighted, color blind or some other form of visual impairment.
It is necessary to take the needs of these users into account while you design web sites. There are two benefits accruing to you: a) Persons of visually impaired will prefer your web site over the others; b) You get higher number of links that ensures higher ranking on Search Engines.
Identifying the Obstacles Caused by Normal Web Design
Visually impaired find numerous issues with the normal Web Design. Some of these obstacles are:
a) The text could be too small to read and the font could be in light colors over a lighter background or dark colors over darker background.
b) The colors could be too similar thus preventing easy distinction between them, especially when used with a Table or frame.
c) The Links may not have a distinctive color and may be overlooked.
d)The forms on the web page may not jump from one field to the next in the right order.
e) The navigation buttons may change too fast.
f) The scroll bars in the text window may be disabled, thus reading text in large fonts difficult.
Tips for Web Design for the Visually Impaired
The Web Design must take into consideration the different type of audience expected on the website, including the visually impaired. Special care should be taken to meet the needs of each type of audience. Web Design should consider making all the links available through text instead of images.
The images used in Web Design should have Descriptive text (also called Alternate Text) which enables visually impaired to understand the context of the image, incase the images look blurred. Similarly, the Web Design in general should use less graphics. This not only reduces load time, but also helps the visually impaired to focus on the text.
The text needs to be well structured and as far as possible should use black color on a white background.
There are several alternate browsers that are used by the visually impaired. These browsers rely on the HTML codes being accurately formatted. Therefore it is essential that although normal browsers may be very tolerant of mistakes in html coding, the code should be validated against standards to ensure that there are no mistakes.
One very interesting and important way to keep your website accessible to visual impaired is to design the website in such a way that the navigation buttons and other elements of the website adapt to the size of the screen.
Designing website for the visually impaired is a social obligation that every web designer and the owner of the website should carry and execute. There are plenty of guidelines available for achieving the same.
