Another project I worked on went live today – Rail Australia

I did the visual design and development for it. Kudos to Greg Ralph for the interface design.

I found this really interesting article the other day and read it on the tram this morning:

http://www.usability.com.au/resources/source-order.cfm

It is in regards to the accessibility of websites and is based on some research and testing of users with screen readers – I found it insightful on many levels.

Although the amount of test participants was low (up to 18 in some of the tests), for Australia I think that it is a pretty good achievement. I can’t imagine there is a huge resource pool to draw from?

Anyway the key things for me in the article were:

• Labelling areas of the page was really useful to screen reader users – labelling the global navigation and the local navigation for example. This is something we don’t do or recommend in our design documents (that I am aware of). I’m not 100% sure what they mean by structural labels either (I have contacted them and asked them to clarify) but I assume it means a heading for each of the main areas of the website. (These headings can be hidden for normal users using CSS too).
• Skip links are good to have, which we already knew and recommend. (Again these can be hidden using CSS for normal users).
• Source order is not that important – which debunks a lot of the web standards movement ideas about content coming before navigation in the code.
• Most screen reader users look at all the links on a web page in isolation of the content – highlighting the need to having meaningful link names which we already knew. Again this is nothing new but it feels good to have the theories confirmed by research.

If anyone knows of any other studies or articles about this subject then please let me know as it is something I’m interested in finding more about.