The web is a magical place, a place where you can be transported to places you have never before seen. It is growing rapidly, as magical places do, limited only by the imagination of the web site creators. As it continues to grow, users with special needs will increase. 1 in 5 Americans between the ages of 15 and 64 years has a disability. Almost 30 percent of all families in the United States are affected by a member who has some type of disability. (as measured by having an activity limitation - see the blue box at the end of this article.).

Web site creators will need to rethink their designs to accommodate them. Fortunately, designing a site for visitors with special needs is not difficult and often results in a much cleaner and more usable site. By making a few simple changes to the site web site designers will be able to enjoy visits from people from all walks of life.

What are these special needs likely to be?

  • Visually impaired (blind, color-blind)

  • Deaf

  • Motion impaired; difficulty using a keyboard or mouse

  • Cognitive impairments

  • Text only browsers (Lynx)

Good web design will automatically accommodate many special needs visitors. For example, clearly specifying the purpose of a page and laying out the navigation logically without relying solely on Java-Script, as well as using alt tags for images, would help all visitors. After all, you never know who will be visiting with their graphics turned off because they must pay for every microsecond of time. Or perhaps they will be using an older browser that does not recognize java scripts. Designing accessible sites often means offering two different methods to achieve the same goal.

It helps to understand how people with special needs envision the web. Blind people typically use screen reader software, which reads the page to them one word at a time, row by row. Think about this for a moment. When you first see a web page, your eyes take in the whole layout - the headers, subheaders, side topics, advertisements, etc. You can quickly see the purpose and organization of the page and skip right to the information you need.

Do some web pages look strange to you? Find out why!

In an effort to make “surfing the net” more enjoyable, some companies have created programs which have actually made it worse. If you notice a lot of blank space on the sites you visit, sentences that seem to be missing words, words that are highlighted in yellow or bronze, links that don’t work or take you to blank pages (etc), it may not be the fault of the site you’re visiting. You may hear the term “spyware” associated with this problem, although there are other products that may cause these problems.

One of the most common is Norton Internet Security and Norton Personal Firewall. It installs with the Ad Blocking feature turned on, which might be a fine feature if computers weren’t so dumb:-)) Unfortunately, there is no way to clearly identify an ad so the software blocks whatever it believes might be an ad. This is a bit like chopping off someone’s hand to remove a hangnail. It works, but wouldn’t you rather have your hand? It also blocks certain picture sizes, those most commonly used by ads. If a picture that you want to see just happens to be the same size, you will only see a blank space. To fix this, just disable the Ad Blocking in Norton Internet Security. (Zone Alarm, Symantec, F-Prot AntiVirus and Webwasher will also block ads and popups, but you have to choose that option.)

Other programs that may interfere with your web viewing are programs commonly referred to as spyware, like Gator/GAIN, Hotbar, MySearch, etc. These programs and toolbars will fill in forms for you and keep track of passwords, which is a nice feature, but you should be aware that whatever information you put in is at risk. These programs run in the background all the time, using up system resources, slowing everything down and occasionally causing your browser to crash. (They also may add icons to your desktop, change your browser settings and home page and won’t allow you to change them back or add themselves to your favorites list permanently.)

They do this so they can collect information about you, what applications you use, how often you access the Internet, where you go while you are there and so on. They use this information to customize your shopping experience i.e. serving you appropriate pop-up ads or unsolicited E-mails (AKA sp*m) for items you might wish to purchase. They also can do a nasty thing to website owners - they change the affiliate code on any advertising to their code. In other words, if your favorite site depends on income from Amazon sales to survive, they are not going to get that commission if the buyer has spyware such as SaveNow installed.