Thinking of Them

This morning, in the class of Technical Writing, the lecturer talked about the accessibility to websites, how disabled people can be forgotten, and so, they can't use some parts of the website, or even totally can't do anything with the website.

When the lecturer gave us students the web design assignment sheet, I didn't think of this issue at all. I was rather upset with the choice of a topic in the topic lists, as we can't create a website on whatever we want.

So, the lecturer talked of web accessibility and this topic reminds me of a few memories and touched me.

Last year, at my home university, I volunteered to help disabled students in their college life. Among the students with whom I had an opportunity to work with, there were two blind students. I attended computer labs with them.

Sometimes, we have to use the Internet to find information on it. The two blind students use the software Jaws, a screen reader program. You follow the text with the cursor, and Jaws reads the text aloud or, reads it in braille if you have the braille keyboard connected to the computer.

But when it came to read online website, we faced a couple of problems. For example, columns. Columns help the user to navigate easily. But this is no help when you can't see them. The blind students sometimes couldn't distinguish a column from the main part of the page. And if they want to pass from a column to the main page, they have to "read" all the column, until the bottom to be able to pass to the main page!

In the last lab sheet, I learnt how to create spry menus... and thinking of the problems we faced, I don't know at all how I can make it friendly to blind users.

I was thinking of all these problems while attending the lecture. I was ready to ask the lecturer if I could create a version that I can show all the skills I got and another version for blind people. The lecturer answered me by showing the class a website in which the designers had the generous idea to create a page particularly for disabled people. It's just a page with mostly text, with no special design to attract the user's eyes... but that's enough to let disabled people access to the contents.

Therefore, I will also do it for my website design assignment! I am not pretending to solve all the problems of the world, and I don't have the power to do that. But I would like to make it a bit easier for disabled people. For having worked with disabled people several times in the past, this problem touches me. And I don't want to leave them behind. Everyone has the right to surf with the wave and should be given opportunities to do it.