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Accessibity of the
VOICE Web Site

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Martin M. Morandell

Evang. Studentenheim
"Dietrich Bonnhoeffer"
Julius Raab Strasse 1-3/308-1
A-4040 Linz
Tel: +43/(0)732/2551-3081
Email:
martin@aib.uni-linz.ac.at

 

 

International Computer Camp

ICC'93, Graz A
ICC 94, Linz, A
ICC 95, Linz/Graz, A
ICC 96, Linz/Graz, A
ICC 97, Zeist, NL
ICC 98, Lyon, Clermont-Ferrand, F
ICC 99, Stockholm, S
ICC 00, Stuttgart, D
ICC01, Skofia Loka, SI

 

Accessibility of the VOICE Web Site

As a member of the International Computer Camp 2000 and a representative of a group of visually impaired specialists of Computer Science for the blind, I have been asked by Dr. Klaus Miesenberger from the University of Linz to test the VOICE Web Site on accessibility and to improve it in form of a stage from 5th to 27th of July 2000 at JRC Ispra / Italy.

The VOICE Web Site

The Web Site is divided into four parts:

  • Projects, Objectives & Events
  • Exploratory Research
  • FORUM & Schools
  • Web Site Management & Downloading

A short overview is given by the SiteMap (http://voice.jrc.it/website/_map_e.htm)

All important pages of the Web Site are available in English, French, Italian, and German. Some pages which are not that important - or just for a certain language area - are not available in all languages.

Accessibility at the beginning

During my preparation for the stay in Ispra I surfed through the Web Site with other visually impaired and blind Computer experts to find out some specific problems. For this, we tried it out with the most used enlargement program "Zoomtext" with Internet Explorer 5.0 and Netscape Navigator 4.5.

To find out the problems for blind users, we used LYNX. We also surfed on the page with WebWizard (a special add on for Internet Explorer) with VIRGO and of course with the most commonly used technology among blind users: Internet Explorer with JAWS.
Due to the web-browser's specific interpretation of the HTML code I figured out a lot of smaller problems, especially by reading out tables is done column by column and this sometimes creates chaos for text-browsing.

Most parts of the Web Site were accessible. This was also shown by the Bobby Approved logo on the bottom of every page.
In large parts, the Web Site was already designed according to the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines given by the W3C organisation (www.w3c.org/wai/)

My work on the Web Site

After creating this list of problems I searched for different possibilities to solve them. At the beginning of my stay, I discussed them with the Site's webmasters. I told them the problems and some possible solutions.
The most important changes we performed:

  • Tables. Some Tables had to be turned due to the way of reading out tables line by line.
  • Graphics: Some graphics had no description. Especially in the German version.
  • Language Links: Those were not done in the same way on all pages. This could lead to confusions using a text Browser.
  • Navigation bar: The colours of the buttons hat too little contrast. Especially by using inverted screen colours (often used by visually impaired) some buttons were not readable any more.
  • Background colour: Especially in the FORUM links, they were very hard to read. Therefor we changed the colours to have a better contrast (even for visited links)
  • FORUM: The FORUM was not accessible with LYNX. The reason was an CGI script written in C. This was not changed, because it was accessible with all other versions of text browsing.

After these changes I did some translation into German and added them to the Web Site, so more information is now also available in German.

Almost all the information which is in the Voice Web Site is now accessible for all users. For normally sighted users via graphics, for visually impaired and blind users via "alt tags" and special graphics descriptions [D].

http://voice.jrc.it/access/webacc_e.htm gives special information about "Web Accessibility." There are links to some pages with rules and Tips&Tricks for creating Web Sites for all kinds of users.

So this Web Site is really a good example for a well designed page which is also accessible for visually impaired and blind users.

December 2000
Martin M. Morandell

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