Activity 2C
C & I 335
Summer, 1998

Toni Greer
Lincoln School
Springfield, Illinois

This web page was written by Art Haley from the Kansas Audio-Reader Network, who gave several suggestions as to how to make web pages more accessible to all. He believes that there should be a compromise when it comes to creating web pages. One should not avoid all the "really cool stuff," but rather make screens that are attractive to sighted people with expensive monitors, load quickly for people with slow modems, and are easily navigable by people using speech synthesis instead of graphic layout. He offers many guidelines as a kind of site building etiquette:

• Put the name of the organization on every page, with a link to the home page.
• Put the name of the person who is responsible for gathering the information at the bottom of the page, and make it a link for sending e-mail. Include the date to show when document was created and/or last updated.
• Include the size of the graphic, and make the text black (or at least a color that would print nicely in case someone would like to do so).
• Leave some margin on the page.

Art Hadley also offers suggestions as to how to make a site speech-friendly:

• Don't put several links in a line.
• Don't make links with nondescriptive phrases.
• Don't put important information in a graphic unless it's provided again in text.
• Don't use frames.
• Don't use multiple columns.
• Don't leave graphics unidentified.
• Check your work to see if it is easy to navigate yourself. You can see how it would look to a Lynk user by going to Lynxit, and typing in your page's URL. Also Bobby is a tool to use to check for accessibility, as we have already studied.

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This web page was written by Jon Gunderson at the University of Illinois. He feels that the usability of the World Wide Web is dependent upon the accessibility of the WWW Browsers, the structure of the information available on the WWW, and the tools used to create and display information placed on the WWW. In order to make technology accessible, there needs to be features that support the navigation and presentation information for people with a variety of movement, sensory and cognitive capabilities. The key seems to be to have the "information available in more than one form and to have it organized in a way that supports the underlying meaning and structure of the information." WWW accessibility needs to look at restructuring the following components:

• the data structures used for representing information
• the tools available to navigate through the WWW
• specialized viewers to present images
• motion pictures and auditory information
• the tools used to create the original forms of the information on the WWW

In conclusion, Jon Gunderson maintains that access to the networks by people with disabilities needs to be "viewed from both a systems wide approach and on how individual tools are designed and implemented." These are great ideas to be aware of when creating a web page.

This site offers a checklist that would be quite helpful if creating a page and you wanted to evaluate it for accessibility.

All of these articles provided me with useful information that will enable me to better meet the demands of the disabled students in my classroom. Having an awareness of these accessibility guidelines will also allow me to be a better role model to my students. As we are creating web pages, I will make them aware of the necessary modifications that would make their pages more accessible to all. This creates an appreciation for others and promotes empathetic feelings, which all students should try to acquire. Thinking of others is sometimes hard for students. I hope to get this message to them in my actions and instruction.