Skills for Access

Description

Operating systems and browsers both have a range of functions that can enable changes to be made to the appearance of on-screen content, for example changing text size, font style or text and background colours. For many people with less severe impairments, these can be effective in minimising or removing any accessibility problems, without the need for expensive assistive technologies.

It's also possible to add to a browser's capability of changing the appearance of web pages can be added through software, bookmarklets or browser extensions. User-defined Cascading Style Sheets are another way in which someone could tell their browser to use a particular set of display instrictions that override whatever the web site author has provided for the site.

Since browser accessiblity fetaures can sometimes be hard to find, or inconsistently supported, or difficult to implement, some web site developers have also incorportated style sheet switching features into actual web pages (such as providing large fonts and high contrast style sheets). This allow users a degree of customisation of the display of the page, and preferences can be stored for future return visits to the same site.

Multimedia Incompatibility

While it's important that web resources are designed in such a way that changes to display made through the browser or operating system can be effectively applied, in reality the appearance of much web content will be unaffected by these changes. In some case this may be due to browser functionality falling short of standards, in other cases it may be due to how the web site is developed. For example, depending on how font sizes are specified for a particular page, Internet Explorer's 'text size' option may not work.

Multimedia web technologies by their nature often result in content that looks exactly the same regardless of the operating system or browsing environment, and while this may be a key objective for the multimedia developer, it can mean that it is impossible for someone to make necessary changes to the display for accessibility purposes. (In fact in some cases the best option is to use the capabilities of the multimedia technology itself to provide the multimedia resource with accessibility options such as alternative display options).