Accessibility

Last week I talked about Markel's measures of excellence, and how they apply to your technical writing. This week, I am going to focus on the measure of accessibility.

As you have probably noticed, the measures are interdependent, and the quality of one measure affects the others. On the surface, accessibility is mainly about navigation and ease of reading for the benefit of the reader. However, imagine a service website that has instructions for multiple products on one screen. That may hinder both accessibility and conciseness. It may also hinder clarity, since the user may be unsure what product he or she is researching.

Accessibility in technical writing, particularly in writing for the web, is fraught with issues, particularly in regards to the disabled. While solutions such as alt-text and cascading style sheets (CSS) make browsing the web easier, they don't address the underlying problem of accessibility.

Assignment

Take a look at the following websites.

The W3C - the World Wide Web Consortium, put in place the standards and practices of the web. Check out their Accessibility page .
Also, check out the Society for Technical Communication's AccessAbility SIG (Special Interest Group)

Now, armed with some knowledge about accessibility, pick three websites to visit on your own. Tell me four things about EACH of these sites:

• What is accessible about the website? What is not?

• How does the accessibility or inaccessability affect the viewing of the site?

• Does the accessibility or inaccessibility affect the credibility of the site or the content's author?

• What could be done to improve the accessibility of the site?