Evaluation - continued ......
Accessibility
One of the most important elements of any software system
is it’s accessibility to it’s users. There has
been serious consideration of how to ensure the system’s
accessibility to all, and I shall mention here the two main
points raised.
System colour scheme
A point was raised by one member within the focus group relating
to the colouring of read and unread articles within news groups.
Originally the interface used red and green to identify unread
and read posts respectively, which unfortunately meant that
one member, as a colour blind person, found it difficult to
distinguish the unread articles from the read ones and he
also highlighted two other colour combinations that he found
difficult to distinguish.
Realising that different people who suffer from colour blindness
more than likely have problems with different colour combinations
it was decided that one colour would be used for all articles
and that unread articles would be represented by making the
subject line bold, rather than a different colour.
Design changes via style sheets
Different disabilities often require different fixes and changes
to be made to a system to make the system useful to a person
suffering from the disability. As stated above, a person suffering
from colour blindness may require the colour scheme to be
changed, while a person who is visually impaired may require
that the font used within the system be considerably larger.
It is seemingly impossible to take into account every disability
consideration and ensure that the system is unaffected by
it. Instead the system offers the ability for the user to
choose the style sheet which they wish to use to browse the
system. This way a style sheet defining the layout, colour
scheme and fonts used throughout the system can easily be
constructed to compensate for any disabilities recognised
which the system does not compensate for.
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