Adapting Web Sites for People with Blindness

Bobby is an Internet site that checks web pages for accessibility. To use Bobby, simply go to the site at http://www.cast.org/bobby/ and input the URLs to be checked. A report summarizing what is not accessible on the page(s) is automatically generated. However, before using Bobby, It is a good idea to be familiar with the guidelines from W3C and NCAM to help in interpreting the results. Recently, this author had the experience of making a site less accessible based on a Bobby report. The site included descriptive menus at the top of each page or section. Each menu selection had a small button or sphere preceding it. Before the Bobby evaluation, a screen reader read the menu selections in their entirety, which worked well for users with blindness. But Bobby identified the small spheres as unlabeled graphics. An image tag was inserted for each button, but instead of the screen reader reading the image tag then the descriptive menu link, it only read the image tag. Thus, when a user came to the top of a section to make a menu selection all s/he would hear is, "blue sphere, blue sphere, blue sphere," which made an informed selection impossible. After removing the image tags the menus work fine again with a screen reader.…