大象传媒

Stepping stone to greater understanding

• By Paul Crichton
• 7 Aug 07, 02:54 PM

The US organisation , together with the , have received a grant to develop a tool to help web developers consider issues of cognitive disability and learning difficulties in their designs.

Because 鈥渃ognitive disability鈥� and 鈥渓earning difficulties鈥� covers a wide variety of conditions, from Down鈥檚 syndrome to brain injury, the issues are also wide and diverse. Whilst pictures, for example, might increase understanding for one group, they could be distracting for another.

There isn鈥檛 a great deal of research available into how people with cognitive or learning disabilities use the web, and few resources available to help web designers build sites with those needs in mind.

Juicy Studio provides a tool which analyses the length of words and sentences for simplicity. My Saturday job as a school kid may have been a "hydro-ceramic technician", but more people would know what I meant if I said I had been a dish washer. There aren't many other tools available to assist the diligent web designer, however.

Called , WebAIM intend to develop best practice guidelines and a tool to assist designers make pages accessible to people with cognitive or learning disabilities. They already have a track record in this area, with to their name.

Writing on the , Henny Swan said of the project, 鈥淭his is great news and something that is very much needed.鈥�

It will be a fascinating project, and I鈥檓 already intrigued as to how much more it might offer in addition to the Juicy Studio tool.

As with most accessibility considerations, benefits can extend beyond the target audience. A while ago a friend was rather embarrassed to confess that the 鈥渆asy-read鈥� version of a technical report his company published had three times as many downloads as the full version. We might all stand to benefit from the WebAIM tool.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |