This week’s lecture focused on Accessibility issues on the web, such as functional and clinical disabilities. Barriers to accessing digital content can stem from visual, auditory, mobility, dexterity, and cognitive function difficulties.
This is a subject area that I currently know little about, yet I’d love to address it within future modules on the course.
Following the lecture, I’ve evaluated the BBC Good Food website in accordance to the W3C Accessibility Principles. I enabled tab-navigation and voiceover functionality on MacOS and Safari, then avoiding looking at my screen.
Initially, I found the experience frustratingly slow. Waiting for the voiceover to stop speaking before pressing tab again really lengthened the process of exploring the landing page. Tabbing faster just seemed to cause a loud din, which further irritated me.
However, bearing with the process for a few more minutes, I began to appreciate the patterns of speech within the voiceover: ‘Link. Parsnip Recipes’ or ‘Visited. Link. Parsnip Recipes’ if I had visited the page before.
Images were correctly captioned, so the voiceover explained what was depicted, and I was able to build a mental picture of the website.
One limitation of the voiceover was its pronunciation of some common words like ‘Favourite’. After some research, it appears that this could have been caused by using an incorrect lang attribute within the page’s code.
I also found some issues in relation to colourblindness and colours chosen for rollover button on the website, however this wasn’t widespread. Emboldening text, or changing the shape or size of the button would have been a more suitable roll-over animation.
Readability was good, which could be expected as the website appears to use the BBC’s sans serif font, “BBC Reith”.
When designing the mobile and web experiences that I have in mind for later in the course, I’ll need to bear these accessibility considerations in mind. I’m particularly interested to apply this same evaluation to a virtual learning environment, such as Canvas – lack of consideration in this area could be a large barrier to learning for some students.
In the meantime, I’ll try to find some books in the University’s library addressing accessibility in User Experience Design.