Improving Accessibility through Typography

 Among the many decisions you need to make when designing accessible web sites, typography seems to frequently be only shallowly addressed. Typography is rarely completely ignored — but it is greatly simplified, to a point that the issues raised don’t always complete the picture of accessible text. Accessible typography is commonly simplified to these three questions:

[via Accessites.org]

A nice summary of essential typography issues from Joe Dolson. (Perhaps one day browsers will give us greater control over online type; the multi-headed monster that is sIFR is sadly not the answer, at least not in its present flaky and unfriendly form.)

5 Basic Steps Towards Website Accessibility

The transformation of a website from a snake-infested inaccessible maze into a beautiful, airy reading room can include a huge variety of design changes from the barely noticeable to the fundamentally transforming. Making that first step into the maze requires you to balance a number of different issues: How long …

[via Improve the Web]

Joe Dolson writes clearly and thoughtfully on accessibility. Improve the Web is one of the best blogs on the web experience. Inevitably, this is a great article. What more is there to say?

I’ve previously posted on this journal about the accessibility of forum software and indicated that I was working on an adaptation of Phorum to make it more accessible.

Since some other open source packages suffer from the same problems I thought it would be worthwhile creating an umbrella project for similar endeavours, which I’ve called XReach.

From the XReach site you can download an early release version of the forum software or have a look at it in use as the discussion area for the site.

It’s very much a work in progress at this stage, but I think it represents an improvement over the base software from an accessibility point of view.

I’m keen to get other people on board, since I don’t know everything there is to know about web accessibility - by a very long way - and I probably won’t be able to spend as much time on the project as I’d like. So if you feel you could contribute in any way, please get in touch. I’m looking for end users, especially those with disabilities that affect their use of the web, as much as developers. Anyone with ideas for improving the user experience would be very welcome.

If you are interested in participating, please either register on the XReach discussion area or send me an email.