Enhancing the Accessibility of .Net 2.0

Alex Homer shares much information in this multi-part article on enhancing the accessibility of your ASP .Net 2.0. The first part of this series deals with accessibility in general: “Web pages today are very different from the original vision of the World Wide Web pioneers. They saw it as a sharing and publishing environment for scientific information, rather than the public network offering online retailing, the source of references material on every topic under the sun, and the general entertainment arena that it has now become. Wide public access and the continuing commercialization of the Web have brought changes in the type of content it offers. The most remarkable change has been the move away from the functional, mainly text-based, types of pages. Today, the Web is ruled as much by designers and graphic artists as by developers and network specialists.

Web pages have become more complicated. No longer is it permissible for your company “home page” to contain a picture of your offices and a simple text menu for the services you offer. Now you have to have drop-down or pop-up menus with myriad links, graphics (preferably animated), and dozens of headlines that lead to press releases, new product details, or testimonials of your services.

All this is fine if your visitors can look at the page and easily identify the areas that interest them, or scan up and down the links to other pages looking for what they want. And, should they stray to the wrong page, it’s usually pretty obvious from a quick glance. However, things are nowhere near this easy for all visitors.

A proportion of visitors will have difficulties with most current Web sites, which are designed almost without exception for people who have reasonable eyesight and are using a pointer device such as a mouse, trackball or graphics tablet. There are many people to whom one or both of these conditions cannot be applied. Often they will be using a specially designed user agent, or maybe a simple text-based browser. Or it might be aural page reader, which reads the contents of pages out loud, or a Braille reader that translates the text into a format that can be read by fingertip on a special output device.

For all these types of device, even the most basic Web site or Web application (designed and tested only in a modern graphical browser such as Internet Explorer) can be hard to read. At best, navigation through the site can be challenging, and certain parts of the content may be meaningless. Graphics and pictures won’t be displayed on text-based devices, while color-blind users may not be able to distinguish between the different lines or pie segments in your charts. At worst, it may be completely impossible use online forms, to even access parts of the site at all.”

Read the full article hosted by 15 Seconds. Information specific to .Net is found in the second part.