Putting Accessibility to the Test

Wow.  I can honestly say that after doing the WebAIM screen reader simulation, I completely understand why Prof. P. wanted us to have a short navigation bar with clear subject links.  The homepage of the “U of A” website alone had 21 navigation links with at least two graphics.  By the time I was getting ready to listen to the menu for the third time in order to figure out which link I needed to follow to get the necessary information, I was already tired of hearing it.  I can’t image what it must be like to try and navigate a site like that every day!

After following this simulation, one of the things I would have liked Joe Clark to go into a little more depth on (and maybe he does in further chapters of his book now that I think back to the chapters he referenced) is how tedious screen readers are, and how concise web designers need to be when creating things like their navigation bars.  It’s one thing to listen to text being read, but it’s something completely different to listen to a huge list of navigation options multiple times in order to navigate to multiple pages.  I found his discussion on the different terms a little repetitive, and almost a little sarcastically demeaning.  He seemed to present some good problems, but not very many helpful solutions.  Again, the reasoning for all this could very well be that he resolves the issues in the remaining chapters in his book, but we’ll see.