When I ran Bobby on my Web site I was very surprised to find that I only had one star out of a possible four stars. This signified that I had some correcting to do to make my page more user friendly for people with disabilities. The majority of the problems I had to correct had to do with the graphics I used, the use of a table and the use of a series of adjacent links.
In a effort to make the use of graphics more user friendly to those students who may be visually impaired I added a text description of each graphic. This should be helpful for those students who have screen reader programs. I also included buttons in front of each person's name in a series and hot linked the buttons instead of the names. I included a text description of the buttons for those students who have screen reader programs.
I did not change the table I have on my HomePage. While Bobby points out that screen readers often read tables incorrectly, tables are the one of the best methods of organizing material for those students who are learning disabled. I opted to leave the table since I have the LD cluster in my classroom and do not work with visually impaired students. It seems that at times the proper accommodations for disabled individuals are in conflict with each other.
On the other hand, separating the adjacent links would be helpful to both visually impaired and learning disabled students. Now I realize that an LD students with visual perception problems would have a very difficult time seeing the names listed separately. To solve this problem I inserted a button for each person's name and added text descriptions for each button.
Other accommodations I would make for the visually impaired and learning disabled would be making the text larger, and limiting the number of graphics on a page which includes general information. For the learning disabled student I would design a page with less text per page and with several pictures to illustrate the text. The goal would be to make the page design simple and uncomplicated, well organized and with space between the different topics on the page. These accommodations would also be useful to visually impaired students.
Using Bobby has made me aware that it is important to keep the needs of disabled individuals in mind when designing a web page. It is also beneficial to know how to check web page designs to find whether they are user friendly for as many people as possible.