Roger Hudson from Web Usability.
Phone: (02) 9568 1535
Email: rhudson@usability.com.au
Web: www.usability.com.au
Date: 20 October, 2004
For the last few years, I have been very interested in how we can use the web to more effectively meet the needs of people with cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties. I have worked closely with the Russ Weakley and Peter Firminger on identifying problems and developing and testing possible solutions.
Russ and I would both like to do presentations at the OzeWAI 2004 Conference:
Several years ago, the Australian Museum asked me to assess the accessibility of a new site they were preparing and, if required, make recommendations for how it might be improved. Russ Weakley, from the Museum, and I worked closely on this project. This collaboration resulted in development of a number of full CSS sites that are accessible for people with vision and other physical disabilities.
In 2003, we had the opportunity to work together again on a project for the NSW Guardianship Tribunal. The Tribunal website (http://www.gt.nsw.gov.au/) has a variety of clients, including health professionals, social workers and people with a range of cognitive and learning difficulties. When we began to focus on how to more effectively meet the needs of people with cognitive disabilities, it soon became clear that it would not be possible to make a site that could be used by all the clients of the Tribunal, for example people with advanced Alzheimer's or senile dementia. As a result, we decided to concentrate on exploring ways of improving website accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities who still had the functional capacity to access the web.
In addition to developing and testing the navigation system, we considered ways of providing the site user with some control over the level of content detail that was presented on the web page. There appeared to be three main options:
We chose short and long content, as it seemed to suit the target audiences better. Also, with this option, it was relatively easy to develop an appropriate content management system that Tribunal staff would be able to use to maintain and update the site.
When people with cognitive and learning difficulties tested the completed site, they were attracted to the short content option and found it easy to use. In keeping with many other accessibility features, we found that this option also benefited to the wider community; social workers and doctors were using short content as a way of quickly locating the information they required.
Key issues relating to cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties
It is easy to form the impression that many web developers and organizations believe that extending the notion of universal accessibility to include people with cognitive and learning difficulties is just too difficult.
In the past, very few web developers have attempted to make sites that meet the needs of people with different cognitive and learning difficulties. The notable exceptions are the few specialist sites that are targeted at specific groups of web users. For example, Web Design for Dyslexic Users (http://www.dyslexia.com/qaweb.htm) and Club NDSS (http://www.clubndss.org/)
Extending the accessibility frontier so that it encompasses people with cognitive and learning difficulties will only become a reality when developers and organizations believe it is achievable and worth doing.
During the last two years, there have been significant advances in the use of CSS to control the presentation of web page content. At the same time, there has been an increasing awareness of the value of developing purpose-built content management systems (with open source or inexpensive tools), which are tailored to the specific needs of the client organization, rather than relying on large off-the-shelf systems.
The power of CSS to control the presentation of web page content is amply demonstrated on many sites today including, of course, CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/). In addition to the ascetic use of CSS as in the Zen garden, it is also being used by some sites to give the user control of the font face and size of text on the screen and thereby, the potential to improve the accessibility of the site for some users. For example, Glish (http://www.glish.com/).
The accessibility of websites for some visitor can be further enhanced by CSS in many other ways. For example, it could allow the user to:
With the Guardianship Tribunal site (http://www.gt.nsw.gov.au/) we were able to demonstrate in a small way how it is possible to build a CSS site and integrated purpose built-content management system that gives the user some control over the actual content of the page. Users of the site are able to choose between long or short content versions for selected pages. The Short option provides an easy-to-read version of the information.
Since it is now possible to make sites that will give users some control over both the information content and the way that content is presented, it is now a matter of convincing developers and organizations that this is worth doing.
For the providers of community services like education, legal and consumer advice, etc, the need to provide information that is accessible to a widest possible range of people with cognitive and learning difficulties and the benefits from doing so are both obvious.
While the providers of commercial services via the Internet also have a responsibility to ensure those services are available to people with disabilities, this requirement is more likely to be enthusiastically embraced when the commercial benefits are clear.
Extending the potential customer base for goods and services to include consumers with cognitive and learning difficulties will bring some benefits to many businesses. However, we may have to wait until organisations start using these technologies to tailor both web page content and presentation to the tastes and needs of different segments of the general marketplace, before we see them being widely user for accessibility purposes.
With the Guardianship Tribunal site we attempted to make a mainstream government site that was able to make some small advances in improving accessibility for site users with some cognitive disabilities. More recently, Russ, Peter and I have prepared prototypes and trial pages to test ways of improving site accessibility for people with reading and learning difficulties. These will be demonstrated at the conference.