From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Accessibility is a general term used to describe facilities or amenities to assist people with disabilities.
This can extend to Braille signage, wheelchair ramps, audio signals at pedestrian crossings, walkway contours, and so on.
In computing, this often includes high contrast fonts, modified keyboard actions, larger fonts, text-to-speech programs, alternative input device support, and the like.
On the World Wide Web, the W3C has produced specific guidelines for accessibility. The Cascading Style Sheets system has been devised with this in mind, since it gives the reader full control over the appearance of the page.
As an example, Internet Explorer has an option to ignore the font size specified in a webpage, so that the user can circumvent a small font forced upon him or her by a webpage author. However, sometimes a webpage author fails to take into account that users may want to apply such an option and designs a webpage such that applying this option gives poor results, such as a too small distance between lines, disabled scrolling even though texts do not fit in assigned spaces, overlapping texts, etc.
Various countries have legislation requiring accessibility:
- In the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 has numerous provisions for accessibility
