Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Tension? what tension?: website accessibility and visual design

Tension? what tension?: website accessibility and visual design It is a widespread belief amongst web designers and implementers that sites that are accessible to users with disabilities must by necessity be uninteresting and simple, particularly visually uninteresting -- plain, vanilla sites. It is tempting to believe that such sites do not pose interesting challenges to web designers and implementers. However, it is our contention that this belief is profoundly misguided. Certainly, a very plain, visually simple site is quite likely to be accessible (although this is not guaranteed). However, the opposite is not necessarily the case -- sites can be visually interesting and sophisticated and still highly accessible. Visual and interesting web design is largely orthogonal to accessibility and these two factors should not be seen as being in opposition to each other. Accessibility should rather be viewed as another challenge to designers and implementers, along with creating a site that is usable, interesting and appealing to mainstream users. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png ACM SIGCAPH Computers and the Physically Handicapped Association for Computing Machinery

Tension? what tension?: website accessibility and visual design

Download PDF
2 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/tension-what-tension-website-accessibility-and-visual-design-gxjSfIKyce
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 by ACM Inc.
ISSN
0163-5727
DOI
10.1145/1036401.1036403
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

It is a widespread belief amongst web designers and implementers that sites that are accessible to users with disabilities must by necessity be uninteresting and simple, particularly visually uninteresting -- plain, vanilla sites. It is tempting to believe that such sites do not pose interesting challenges to web designers and implementers. However, it is our contention that this belief is profoundly misguided. Certainly, a very plain, visually simple site is quite likely to be accessible (although this is not guaranteed). However, the opposite is not necessarily the case -- sites can be visually interesting and sophisticated and still highly accessible. Visual and interesting web design is largely orthogonal to accessibility and these two factors should not be seen as being in opposition to each other. Accessibility should rather be viewed as another challenge to designers and implementers, along with creating a site that is usable, interesting and appealing to mainstream users.

Journal

ACM SIGCAPH Computers and the Physically Handicapped – Association for Computing Machinery

Published: Jun 1, 2003

There are no references for this article.