Our first line of T-shirts is here! Catering to that inner geek, the “Standards Compliance” line tips its hat to Shepard Fairey, the W3C, the BLINK TAG, Lou Montulli, and Bert Bos. Declared “Simply Evil” by Jakob Nielsen, this shirt is a cultural gem, a tribute, and a must have for every geek-at-heart. Get yours today!
Spreadshirt Market Place Product
Spreadshirt Market Place Product
Those crazy cool kids at Mozilla Labs have just announced the release of their experimental plugin Geode. Using the draft W3C Geolocation standard they plan on enabling your browser to dynamically determine its location to provide cool value-adds like location-switching RSS feeds and emergency restaurant location. For us the ubiquity of geolocation services is a natural progression towards augmented reality but we can’t help finding ourselves a little amused at an application that politely asks permission to know where it is and then offers the user a choice of resolutions (exact, neighborhood, city, nothing) for each page using the service. That sure makes for a transparent experience! Sheesh.
We’re almost a decade past the web’s initial foray into accessibility and the US government’s attempts at legislating accessibility standards, and web accessibility still sucks. Current standards and guidelines don’t go far enough. (Sure, some come close, but we’re nowhere near where we need to be.)
Rumors and ignorance still dominate how people approach accessibility. Often people assume that accessibility is somehow not worth the effort—that accessibility costs too much in terms of time or money; that accessibility translates to spartan, utilitarian, even ugly design; or that accessibility is something that can be considered as an afterthought. Sometimes people even assume that accessibility only means passing some automated test. None of these beliefs are accurate. In reality, the opposite is true.
We’re here to change the situation. At Tanagram we are committed to accessibility in every aspect of our work. We are convinced that the internet can truly be the great equalizer. We are committed to providing rich, egalitarian experiences for all users, including people with visual impairments and members of the Blind and Deaf communities. To reflect this attitude, we make accessibility part of our entire process.
No one deserves or should have to make do with a substandard online experience. Accessibility isn’t just about helping people different from us. It enhances all of our online experiences and has benefits beyond doing the right thing, including improved usability and more reliable SEO. Good things happen when we begin a project with an accessibility-oriented mindset.
The little “508” badge at the bottom left of our site only signifies our commitment to accessibility. To get a better taste of where we want to take accessibility, fire up a text-only browser, JAWS, or your favorite assistive technology. We think you’ll like what you experience.
Here’s a question to you. Do you think that 508 Compliance provides the best experience for people with disabilities? We did some tests with blind respondents back in January of this year for a large online/brick-and-mortar retailer and I’m here to tell you it is not.
Most everyone has heard about Target’s lawsuit for not providing access for disabled individuals. Having seen their site translated by JAWS I can attest to the fact that the experience merited a lawsuit. But we also tested many other eCommerce sites and found that even the best still took 5 minutes to traverse one page. Section 508 Compliance, and for the most part the W3C Accessibility Standards, only mandates proper display of information so that it can be accessed by assisting devices. What is missing is an understanding that maybe the content presented to individuals with disabilities should be streamlined to be more appropriate to the medium they use to access it.
We did some research and found that in the United States today there are 10 million blind and visually disabled individuals. We’re still gathering numbers on what percentage of that group is purchasing products on the internet but it’s interesting to note that the number is expected to triple in the next 10 years as baby boomers age. This seems to me to be a significant enough number to incite retailers to start thinking about the problem now.
We’ve gone down the path a little bit by creating an applet that can detect JAWS (remember it’s not a browser, it reads the content in a browser) and swaps out the presentation style sheet accordingly. We’re also starting to understand what the blind consumer really shops for. We believe there is an opportunity for some thinking with regard to product descriptions. Blind people cannot use color and other visual descriptions to purchase products.
I think the most telling tale is that of Peapod. Peapod provides to-the-door delivery of grocery items in Chicagoland and other markets like New York, Washington, DC, and Boston. They offer a service that is not only desired, but required for those with visual impairments. Unfortunately, their site is not accessible. There are even classes that teach the blind how to navigate the Peapod site.
So what do we do? Well, this post is the beginning of a discussion. We will continue to explore and hopefully you will join us. We have already begun working with the wonderful folks at the Chicago Lighthouse to gain insight. Hopefully we can make the world just a little bit better for everyone.
Welcome to the spill. The overflow buffer for the passion we have for interaction.
Spill is the blog from Tanagram, Inc. a technology innovation and design company based in Chicago, Illinois.
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