Accessibility
Why Accessibility?
Many of the first friends I made online (in the 1980s) were blind. They used computers with speech synthesizers, and some used specialized computers with Braille keyboards and no monitor. The latter was an Australian product, serviced and maintained by a blind man and his wheelchair-bound partner. All this technology fascinated me, and seeded my drive to produce accessible software and web sites.
Most people experience disability at some point in their life, so the investment in accommodating them is worth the return. In fact, all my disabled friends choose their banks, insurance companies and utility providers according to which web sites they can use—accessibility isn't a novelty; it affects the bottom line! Given this, it's surprising how often suggestions for even cheap improvements meet resistance. I once had to insist very strongly to not use red and green to distinguish between negative and positive amounts on a financial statement, because it would have made our site difficult for many color-blind users to understand. Some 10% of men are color-blind, and the work required to accommodate them was to change just one line of CSS!
Doing it Properly
This web site performs well in accessibility testing software, including the well-known but
defunct Bobby software. But as all these tools state, just because a web site or piece of
software passes a test, doesn't mean it's necessarily accessible. For example, the purpose of
alt image attributes is to substitute relevant non-textual information, but
many web developers still use them as a short-hand way of providing tool tips. Accessibility
testing software has no way to detect this abuse.
I have had this web site reviewed by people who depend on various accessibility tools every day, and I have worked with many such users to ensure my product is as usable as possible for them. It is entirely possible to do this without compromising the experience for mainstream users, and I have the experience necessary to do so efficiently.
