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I had the option of an afternoon or morning meeting today and stupidly - last week, without thinking it out - picked the morning session. I really really didn’t want to hear the alarm when it went this morning. In spite of the fact I sat perched on the side of the bed, slowly sipping my way to the bottom of a hot drink before even thinking about the shower I still made it to London twenty minutes early, and walked around in the rain trying to read my rapidly disintegrating map.

I found where I was supposed to be, and was greeted with tea and biscuits and lovely warm radiators to dry out my coat.

It was well worth the effort, though. I was there for a usability seminar on making sites more accessible to physically disabled or visually impaired users. I was shocked how inaccessible some of the sites I use every day turned out to be when we ran them through screen readers. Was relieved to see mine works fairly well, being very light on the graphics. It’s inspired me to tweak it over Christmas, though, and make sure it can be read by all.

Was shocked to find that 20% of all school children (and by inference 20% of all people everywhere) have some form of special need, ranging from complete inability to use a keyboard or mouse so they have to use special buttons or sticks, to simple colour blindness that makes it difficult to discern some text colours on top of certain backgrounds.

This is bad news for Apple, as Windows is currently far better equipped to work with things like screen readers. Trouble is, they cost around

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 12th, 2002 at 11:42 pm and is filed under Journal, Radio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.