Enlarging Text Accessibility Features

Text Enlarging is one of the main accessibility features when looking at websites. as websites such as bbc news etc are becoming more and more popular and the world of books is being taken over by the world of media and the internet, people are taking much more time to read online material. however there is still alot of inaccessiblity issues with text size so have looked at what is out there to help and this is what i have found:

Within Interent Explorer they have a simple drop down menu that enables the user to use a simple drop down menu in order to change the size of the text to make it easier to read.


To my surprise i could not find any such feature within Firefox. this surprises me as i expected it to be the other way around. i was expecting firefox to have a add-on or plugin to help with this issue

Tips for web design - Font

Use only fonts that are likely to be installed on your visitors computers and consider the differences between Windows and Mac users fonts.
Use Sans-serif fonts for higher readability on screen.
Use Serif fonts for higher readability on printed paper and/or for page headings.
Use font families to specify an ideal, alternative, common and generic font typeface.
Use monospaced fontfaces to display computer code.
As a general guideline use a maximum of three different fonts on the one webpage. Too many fonts can be confusing and make all harder to read.

http://www.web-energy.co.uk/best-fonts-for-accessibility-and-readability.aspx

Artifact 2 What I Found Out

Looking at my test site now i can see such a difference already, i always knew that colour was very important but i always thought it was something you could play around and have fun with and from this second artifact i have no realised how important is it. the colour of a site is the first thing people see when entering a website so if it inaccessible they will not stay within ur site for long. so you have to think carefully when choosing colour as you mite like a pink site wiv green spots but most people dont and if you want them to visit your site you have to think of them when choosing accessible colour. i also learnt that colour also has an effect on the way that users can navigate your site. if the pages are all of the same colour then the user knows that they are withing the same site as they navigate the site, if your pages are different colours then the users can feel lost or like they are going in and out of your website.

Artifact 2 What I Did

For my second artifact i made my test website a little bit more accessible by changing the colours. the first thing i did was to look which colours were the inaccessible for users with sight impairments and colourblindness. i found that people who are colourblind can see slight colour as they can see certain tones and colours. For red they can see a light shade of blue and for green they can see a bright shade of yellow. so keeping this in mind i decided to keep the colours to a minimum and used red to highlight the important areas such as links and buttons as although they cannot see the actual colour red they can see enough difference to distinguish the difference between that and the rest of the text. i also looked at the colour of the text as i found that it was one of the accessibility requirements within the web standards, (this is shown in one of my previous post). i also noticed this was an issue after taking a screenshot of my test site and taking all of the colour away i soon realised that you could not read the text at all. this is shown in the images below.

This is the original test site


This is what users who cannot see colour could see when viewing my original test website


so from looking at all of the issues I've mentioned above i decided that i would use and off white background black text and red for the links and buttons. i decided on this as it would therefore be accessible for everyone including users without visual impairments and difficulties. the off white and black would be easier as white and black can be a bit difficult to look at for long periods of time so by using an off white colour solves this issue



the image below shows the improved test site when the colour is removed


as you can see there is a significant different and the improved site is much more accessible.

Artifact 2

So ive now looked at colour then next accessibility feature i am going to look at is text. im going to look at the features that already exist including browser features that allow you to enlarge the text on a website. i will also look into makin my own accessibility feature within my test site. i will also look at which fonts are most accessible online both for mac and pc

Useful Quote For Evaluation Artifact 2

Ensure that foreground and background color combinations provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen. [Priority 2 for images, Priority 3 for text].
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CSS-TECHS/#ref-LIGHTHOUSE

Artifact 2

For my next artifact im going to change the colour of my website in order to make it more accessible, for this i will look at the different colour that effect people with sight difficulties and impairments. i will also look at good contrasts of colour for things such as background colour, text and links. i will then make a number of different examples of colour schemes then test them to see which one people find easiest to see and use, then i will evaluate the findings.

Colour Blind Add on/Plugin

For my next Artifact i am looking at colour and how it has an effect on Accessibility. to do this i have found a firefox plugin

This plugin is called ColourBlind Ext. This is a feature made by firefox for web developers to enable them to build a accessible website for people that are colour blind. this add on enables web develops to see what people with sight impairments see and therefore addapt there websites accordingly. this is a really good idea as it is sometimes easy to get carried away when using colour within a website. this add on has an number of different features that accommodate to every different kind of colourblindness such as Protanopia, Duteranopia, Tritanopia and Rod monochromacy.

onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_fXjBvMhg054/SYwC_HE0s3I/AAAAAAAAALU/U-_-Gb3SyT4/s1600-h/firefoxaddon.jpg">

Artifact 1

The second part of our research project is Practice based research there fore we have to create a number of artifacts in order to test and evaluate them. My research project is based on Accessibility. therefore for my first artifact i wanted to create a site that was totally unaccessible. i started by looking at the Accessibility requirements i figured if i got an idea of the requirements then i could do the opersite in order to create an unaccessible website.

so this is what i did
- Used a table
- Used lots of content and lots of options within the same page
-Used lots of different focus points on the same page
- Used lots of unnecessary images and graphics
- Added lots of Links and Rollovers
- Used very small text
- Used small text for headings
- Used brightly coloured text such as red on white, orange, blue and green
- No "image tag" descriptions on images
- No contrast between text colour and background colours e.g medium blue text on a light blue background
- Added flash

Doing all of these things enabled me to create what looked like the worst website in the world. i got to the stage when i couldn't even look at it. But it had the desired affect and will be a perfect example to test the rest of my artifacts against.