Sina Bahram, from the USA is ‘an accomplished “universal design” and accessibility evangelist’. At times he talks almost as quickly as his screen reader, as he shows you how a screen reader user accesses webpages and provides you with accessibility tips using the screen reader JAWS. YouTube video available at http://youtu.be/92pM6hJG6Wo
The following pages aim to help you improve your knowledge about accessibility and ease of use and how to make your web services more suitable for around 25% of the population who may have difficulties using on-line content.
Tom Shakespeare, on models of disability: “I think that neither the ‘medical model’ nor the ‘social model’ provide the whole picture. Disabled people’s lives are complex. Our limitations or difficulties of body and brain do cause us problems. Nobody wants their experience to be medicalised, but nor do we want to reject medicine. Equally, we want to challenge barriers and discrimination. In other words, people are disabled by society, and by their bodies. It is the interaction of individual factors – impairment, motivation and self-esteem – with external factors – the barriers, oppression and expectations and attitudes of other people – which combine to create the experience of disability.” (Looking back, moving forward – BBC Ouch 2006 – cached)
The requirement for enterprises and entrepreneurs to avoid discriminatory practices related to disability is paramount and has been mentioned in QAA code of practice (1999) and Equality Act 2010. It is also laid out in the British Standard BS8878:2010 described by Jonathan Hassell in his HassellInclusion articles.
Instructions
All the content on this website is free to browse at you leisure, but we advise you to follow these steps so that you can make the most of this training course.
- Take the quiz before you begin to have fun testing your accessibility and inclusive design knowledge. The number of correct answers returned can be used as a benchmark when you come to re-take the quiz! It is totally anonymous.
- Once you have completed the quiz for the first time, you can look through the resources offered and learn more about accessibility and inclusive design. The pages can be read in any order. When you feel you know enough to test yourself again, move to step three.
- Take the quiz for the second time. This time you will be given feedback on each of your answers. Once again anonymous (which is why we suggest you note your score on the first quiz).
- Having completed these tasks we would be very grateful if you could fill in the 5 minute Usability Survey below.
- We will be running lunchtime sessions to discuss any matters of interest arising from these resources and the comments received. There will be a laptop with a variety of assistive technologies and experts on hand to advise. If you are interested in these sessions please contact us. Thank you so much.
If you are unable to access the evaluation questionnaire below, it is also available from the University of Southampton survey site
[iframe https://www.isurvey.soton.ac.uk/3033 870 800]