Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

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Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability Page 14

by Steve Krug


  The single best thing you can do to improve your site’s accessibility is to test it often, and continually smooth out the parts that confuse everyone. In fact, if you don’t do this first, no matter how rigorously you apply accessibility guidelines, people with disabilities still won’t be able to use your site. If it’s not clear to begin with, just fixing code problems is like [insert your favorite putting-lipstick-on-a-pig metaphor here].

  #2. Read an article

  As I hope you’ve seen by now, the best way to learn how to make anything more usable is to watch people actually try to use it. But most of us have no experience at using adaptive technology, let alone watching other people use it.

  If you have the time and the motivation, I’d highly recommend locating one or two blind Web users and spending a few hours with them observing how they actually use their screen reader software.

  Fortunately, someone has done the heavy lifting for you. Mary Theofanos and Janice (Ginny) Redish watched 16 blind users using screen readers to do a number of tasks on a variety of sites and reported what they observed in an article titled “Guidelines for Accessible and Usable Web Sites: Observing Users Who Work with Screen Readers.”6

  6 Published in the ACM magazine Interactions (November-December 2003). With permission from ACM, Ginny has made it available for personal use at redish.net/images/stories/PDF/InteractionsPaperAuthorsVer.pdf. Yes, it’s ten years old, but it’s still relevant.

  As with any kind of user testing, it produced invaluable insights. Here’s one example of the kinds of things they learned:

  Screen-reader users scan with their ears. Most blind users are just as impatient as most sighted users. They want to get the information they need as quickly as possible. They do not listen to every word on the page—just as sighted users do not read every word. They “scan with their ears,” listening to just enough to decide whether to listen further. Many set the voice to speak at an amazingly rapid rate.

  They listen to the first few words of a link or line of text. If it does not seem relevant, they move quickly to the next link, next line, next heading, next paragraph. Where a sighted user might find a keyword by scanning over the entire page, a blind user may not hear that keyword if it is not at the beginning of a link or a line of text.

  I recommend that you read this article before you read anything else about accessibility. In 20 minutes, it will give you an appreciation for the problems you’re trying to solve that you won’t get from any other articles or books.

  #3. Read a book

  After you’ve read Ginny and Mary’s article, you’re ready to spend a weekend reading a book about Web accessibility. These two are particularly good:

  A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences by Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery. (Their approach: “Good UX equals good accessibility. Here’s how to do both.”)

  Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance by Jim Thatcher et al. (“Here are the laws and regulations, and we’ll help you understand how to meet them.”)

  These books cover a lot of ground, so don’t worry about absorbing all of it. For now, you just need to get the big picture.

  #4. Go for the low-hanging fruit

  Now you’re ready to do what most people think of as Web accessibility: implementing specific changes in your pages.

  As of right now, these are probably the most important things to do:

  Add appropriate alt text to every image. Add an empty (or “null”) alt attribute () for images that screen readers should ignore, and add helpful, descriptive text for the rest.

  To learn how to write good alt text—and in fact to learn how to do any of the things in this list—head over to webaim.org. The folks at WebAIM have written excellent practical articles covering the nuts-and-bolts details of almost every accessibility technique.

  Use headings correctly. The standard HTML heading elements convey useful information about the logical organization of your content to people using screen readers and make it easier for them to navigate via the keyboard. Use

for the page title or main content heading,

for the major section headings,

for subheadings, and so on, and then use CSS to redefine the visual appearance of each level.

  Make your forms work with screen readers. This largely boils down to using the HTML