Can the design of a web page exclude people with disabilities?
Note to readers: EL PAS offers the Future Planet section for its daily and global information contribution on the 2030 Agenda. If you want to support our journalism, subscribe here. The Government uses the Internet to disseminate different information, to promote civic participation of citizens and to improve access to public services, explains Amlcar Paco, a data engineer from the Forum of Mozambique Associations of People with Disabilities (FAMOD). Therefore, people with certain characteristics are limited in access to that information. It is paradoxical because it is the government itself that promotes the law on access to information, but its web pages, where they disseminate the same law, are not accessible to people with disabilities , says the one who has developed a pioneering research, not only in Mozambique but throughout the continent, on accessibility to the web for people with functional diversity in the country. More information  The study, developed by FAMOD with the collaboration of the organization Data4Change and with the support of CIPESA, has yielded revealing data on internet access in Mozambique. Each of the unique pages that have been reviewed contained 38 obstacles, a total of 700,000 obstacles to accessing the content that the 90 websites analyzed were hosting. Among this selection of domains are some of the most important digital spaces focused on government services, online commerce portals, electronic banking and news, mainly health information. These results lead the authors of the report to consider that it is necessary to take immediate measures, both from awareness raising and from the adoption of laws. Having a low color contrast on your website is like going dumb. People wont know what youre trying to tell them Amlcar Paco, the head of the study from the FAMOD team  Paradoxically, many of these problems are very easy to solve, but they pose insurmountable obstacles for people with certain disabilities. I think they are the result of ignorance and lack of awareness. People just dont know that they must follow a rule when developing their websites, for example Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG, for the acronym in English). They are not aware that they exclude a large number of people when they develop a website and they do not verify the accessibility problem , laments Amlcar Paco, the head of the study from the FAMOD team. The most common of these obstacles is the lack of contrast between the color of the texts and that of the background. This excludes people with limited or insufficient vision. Having a low color contrast on your website is like going dumb. People will not know what you are trying to tell them , says the report that at all times is formulated as an attempt to move to change. The research identifies the five most common accessibility deficiencies, which are completed by the lack of tags in the web page elements, an operation linked directly to the structure and the coding; the inactive links; images without textual descriptions; and interactive elements without alternative texts, that is, without clear explanations. Most of these drawbacks hinder, for example, the operation of screen readers that are often used by blind people and that convert websites into read text or mechanisms that, due to mobility reasons, cannot handle mice. This work aims to be pedagogical and practical. Try to convey to most of the people how a blind person or who has some difficulty using a mouse experiences navigation with these accessibility problems. Texts without structure or punctuation marks or provocative calls to click on a link that does not exist, spaces of a flat color instead of photos or forms in which it is impossible to know what the possible answers are are some of the mechanisms with which tries to transmit the experience of people with disabilities. Texts without punctuation marks or provocative calls to click on a link that does not exist or spaces in a flat color instead of photos are some of the mechanisms that try to convey the experience of people with a disability  The investigation has exposed the situation in Mozambique, which is very likely not very different from the rest of its neighbors. I have no elements to know what the situation is in other countries (similar analyzes have not been made). But in most of the neighboring countries there are no specific laws for website accessibility, says Amlcar Paco. The results are surprising, acknowledges the engineer, who also gives the key to the scope and depth of these difficulties and the importance of being aware of the consequences of these failures: Among the websites with the worst results is, for For example, a job offers website. It turns out that organizations that fight for inclusion and human rights publish their vacancies on this same website. This evidence generates a controversy, because those organizations, unconsciously, are already excluding a large number of people due to the problems of the web . And the consequences are immediate. People end up giving up to apply for a job offer because the website is not ready, he says. The analysis is presented in a dynamic way through a space that emphasizes work for accessibility through awareness and awareness. In addition to spotting the main obstacles, the project promoters offer simple resources to solve them, from digital guides to tips that can be used in the development of web pages. Content creators, designers and developers have a responsibility in this matter. They are the ones who create the websites, so they must make sure they are accessible , he justifies. Colleges, universities and other educational establishments should include website accessibility in their web programming training curricula. Another possible solution would be to adjust the system so that companies hire only developers of this profile . The project in which this research is framed includes other materials. The automated method we use (an open source application known as ax-core) to collect this data, it can only detect a small proportion of the accessibility obstacles , says the report, which refers, among other issues, to the fact that the content itself is clear and understandable, for example. Among these other contents there is a provocative quiz for content creators which tries to reveal the extent to which many of their decisions are unconscious, while offering them simple solutions. You can also find a good amount of resources to improve accessibility, such as Toolbox, from tutorials to guides for different professionals in the world of the web. In his position, the person in charge of this pioneering study opts for different approaches: As an organization, of course, we believe that the drafting of a web accessibility law should be promoted. But individually I would bet on creating a community of professionals linked to the field of accessibility in ICT. This community would work in training centers to incorporate this matter as an object of study and test new government web pages, among other actions . This is how he shows that for him the greatest importance lies in raising awareness, above all, because the impacts of improving accessibility conditions are diverse: It is not limited only to people with disabilities. Accessibility solves problems for everyone, with or without disabilities, because even those with perfect eyesight and hearing have ever appreciated subtitles . You can follow PLANETA FUTURO in Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and subscribe here to our newsletter.