Did you know that a little over 35% of the traffic online, visiting web sites, are those that are visually impaired and that, by next year, the numbers will be doubled? What does this mean to you and all of us that created and maintain websites? That some things just don't work. Flash sites are completely left alone by visually impaired folk: that's a lot of traffic/interest and, for those of us that are wanting to make money from our site, possible money earned. Not to mention that there are those out there that make css the backbone of their design, and there is a good chunk of css that interfere with a person being able to actually see the website, much less interferes with those that have hardware that reads a site for them.

So, what to do? If you're interested, I am going to be starting a series of things that a person can do to make their site visually impaired friendly, while still having fun with creating their website for non-visually impaired folk. There is a middle ground.

Let me know if you're interested, because I have the information

 

 

 

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Are you serious about those numbers? And by visualy impared we're talking about blindless right?

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Well, if it includes people with Spectacles.. or you might say 4 eyes! then Count me in

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Well, whatever the definition of visualy impared, please share the information, I'm pretty interested in how to make a web page more accesable to everyone.

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Please count me in for this conversation.

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I can think a couple of things that I do to keep my websites accesibles:

-Don't use flash, and if I do, I don't use that tiny pixel fonts. I don't know why flash designers think they are soo cool, but it's not a good idea put a text that a percent of your visitors can't see.

-Use colors that contrast for text and background. For professional websites I stick to black text in white background. I have visited sites that use brown text in black background, I have to highlight it to read it.

-I use css for styles and use em for font sizes, not pixels or units. This allow the visitor to set the font size in their browsers (most of them) they can set the font to largest. I always test that this won't breake my layout.

-Again using css I always specify the background colors (even if I have a image as background). Some people may have images disabled and a custom background color in their browsers, if for example I have white text in a dark image background (and forgot to set a background color) and my visitor has images disabled and a custom white background he/she won't be able to read my texts.

 

 

 

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