The Essential Web Accessibility Workshop
Shaw Trust Disability Action Centre, Neath
Monday 21st November

This was a great opportunity to see various equipment disabled people use to surf the web. We were shown screen readers, screen magnifiers, voice-activated software and alternative input methods such as switch access.

It made me realise the importance of designing accessible websites. Although I was already aware of the importance of 'alt' tags and scalable text, I realised how important it is to try to limit the amount of links on each page. For example if there are 100 links on the home page of a site, someone using switch access would need to tab through all the links to reach the last one. It also underlined the importance of CSS, especially to reduce the amount of redundant information that screen readers read.