Interface design
One of the defining principles of the Web is that it should provide all people, regardless of their physical or technological condition, with access to information. Today designers have more tools to create structured and navigable websites without undermining accessibility. Around the world, initiatives state that disabled users have equal access to Internet resources. These include the guidelines issued by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and, in the United States, the provisions of Section 508 of the federal Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998 (29 U.S.C. § 794d). (For the U.S. guidelines, see 36 C.F.R. Part 1194.) The result is that Web interface design is intricately tied to accessibility design.
As with most assistive technology, changes made to accommodate those with a disability end up benefiting everyone. A web page that is designed with accessibility in mind will be better structured and more user-friendly.
Of course, being able to see everything on a web page certainly does not guarantee that one will know what to do on the page or the optimal way to perform a task. This observation holds equally true for users with disabilities: just because a site is technically accessible to disabled users does not mean that it will be quick or easy for them to perform tasks on the site. Accordingly, for people with disabilities, not only technical accessibility must be ensured, but also ease and efficiency of use and productivity.
In order to ensure that people of all abilities using any internet device can access this site, the Stanford Office of Judicial Affairs website is built using web standards (such as valid HTML and Cascading Style Sheets) developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the inventors of the Web, to facilitate the accessibility and interoperability of the Web.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) enable more sophisticated page design (typography and layout) and they easily help to maintain sites, keeping them up to date. Some benefits are more consistency, content positioning, better layout and visual design, plus easier HTML coding. CSS also greatly simplified the process of making web pages accessible to as many people as possible, regardless of the device they use to read a page, and regardless of any disability they might have. One of the most important features of style sheets is that they specify how a document is to be presented on different media: on the screen, on paper, with a speech synthesizer, with a braille device, with a handheld device, etc.
Many accessibility solutions like CSS contribute to "universal design" (also called "design for all") by benefiting non-disabled users as well as people with disabilities. For example, support for speech output not only benefits blind users, but also Web users whose eyes are busy with other tasks; with the application of CSS, web page readers can customize presentation of the information to suit their personal learning styles, access devices or needs.
Using CSS2's support for the print media, background and navigational bars are hidden (avoiding waste of ink and paper) as the page is fed to the printer, without the need of a "printable version" link. This advantage not only simplifies the loading of the page a single time (instead of two -once to access and then to print it-), also it reduces the versions of the same page that need to be updated.
Documents on this website are presented in many formats that are generally accessible to individuals using screen reading software. Some files are posted as Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) files. Users with visual disabilities can download Accessible Adobe Reader software from Adobe that will assist with reading PDF files.
To reduce the amount of unnecessary reading of aural content, alternative navigation is provided for browser configurations coupled with screen reading capabilities, bypassing repetitive sections from navigation links that users do not need to hear.
In addition, particular attention was given to color-blind users, who are able to recognize which links have been visited because the color code for such links has been set to blue/green (active/visited), instead of the browser default used blue/purple.
Copyright © 2003 by Office of Judicial Affairs