Hilary Lister, a quadriplegic sailor from Kent, today sets out on a 3 month journey round the coastline of Britain and Ireland in her specially adapted sailing boat. Hilary, 36, will control the boat using a specially designed sip and puff mechanism and the journey looks like being a test of the adaptability of the technology and the determination of Hilary herself.
The full story can be found here.
In the accessibility industry we are used to thinking of assistive technology in very limited terms. I know that in my case, I never really considered the power of a simple sip and puff switch much beyond actually navigating a website. We can sometimes become blinkered and end up thinking of assistive technology purely in terms of navigating websites.
The overwhelming irony of Hilary's story is of course that whilst she may be able to navigate a rugged coastline in all weathers using this technology, many disabled people using similar assistive technology struggle to complete basic web forms or purchase goods over the internet. Not because of failings in the technology but failings in the way the site is built.
The creation of Hilary's purpose built boat was quite clearly an expensive project. Implementing basic web accessibility on the other hand is not. Accessibility audits regularly find the same issues across many different sites, with most of these issues requiring only a few simple tweaks to the underlying markup to make a major difference for disabled users and assistive technology.
Common issues include images missing alternative text, form fields without adequate labels and functionality which is lost when scripting is disabled or unavailable in the browser.
It certainly should make us all sit up and think that if something as complex and dangerous as navigating rough coastal waters can be made accessible then there is no excuse at all for providing your customers with an inaccessible web experience.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment