Today was the day #2 of the Inclusive New Media Design workshops – and it was a very interesting day as I learnt about people with ID (Intellectual Disablility) and their perspective on every day life as well as their use of the internet. I’m hoping there will be some reference material going up on the INMD site over the next few days which will be good to read.
I was quite shocked at the poor standard of code and overall design for the example sites we looked at. These sites are designed specifically for people with ID and I somehow naively expected both their code and their visual design to be much more up to the modern standard. The code is very poor on most, the information often lacks / or neglects/ good structure, navigation is often confusing and odd … – I cannot understand why so little care is taken in producing these sites… :”(
Hopefully the links we looked at will soon be available on the INMD site – but for now, the ones I can remember (coincidentally these are the better ones out of the list of sites we looked at):
We also looked at the symbols and aids available for web designer to use to make a site accessible to people with ID – I was again educated – shocked to find out that these symbols and and helper application are priced so highly while remaining insufficient and at best merely adequate. Just a few related links for reference for now (again, hoping the INMD site will become a more complete reference):
- BroweAloud – a screen reader, similar to JAWS
- Symbol World – makers of one of the symbol sets used
- Reactive Colours – a project to explore a positive computer environment for people with severe ID
That’s all for today – got to get back to things….
