> Stepping stone to greater understanding
- 7 Aug 07, 02:54 PM
The US organisation WebAIM, together with the National Center on Disability and Access to Education, have received a grant to develop a tool to help web developers consider issues of cognitive disability and learning difficulties in their designs.
Because “cognitive disability” and “learning difficulties” covers a wide variety of conditions, from Down’s syndrome to brain injury, the issues are also wide and diverse. Whilst pictures, for example, might increase understanding for one group, they could be distracting for another.
There isn’t a great deal of research available into how people with cognitive or learning disabilities use the web, and few resources available to help web designers build sites with those needs in mind.
Juicy Studio provides a Readability Test tool which analyses the length of words and sentences for simplicity. My Saturday job as a school kid may have been a "hydro-ceramic technician", but more people would know what I meant if I said I had been a dish washer. There aren't many other tools available to assist the diligent web designer, however.
Called The Stepping Stones Project, WebAIM intend to develop best practice guidelines and a tool to assist designers make pages accessible to people with cognitive or learning disabilities. They already have a track record in this area, with evaluation tools to their name.
Writing on the RNIB Web Access Centre Blog, Henny Swan said of the project, “This is great news and something that is very much needed.”
It will be a fascinating project, and I’m already intrigued as to how much more it might offer in addition to the Juicy Studio tool.
As with most accessibility considerations, benefits can extend beyond the target audience. A while ago a friend was rather embarrassed to confess that the “easy-read” version of a technical report his company published had three times as many downloads as the full version. We might all stand to benefit from the WebAIM tool.
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I've always told my content producers that if they are worried about the readability of something then type it in word and run the Flesch-Kincaid grade level test.
But to be able to run that on an entire site.....
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