I’ve really gone off drop-down menus. They’re a hideous, fiddly complication to click on much of the time. When I started this site I got a bit over-excited and tried to put one on, then thought ‘what am I doing?’ I couldn’t get it to work anyway, and just as well. Boo to that.
They’re not accessible, that is to say people with visual impairments can’t use them. Browsers have much adaptability built in and some people use more specialist software that reads websites out loud, such as Browsealoud. These people have the patience of a saint, as they sit having every single link read out to them in a robotic monotone. Having mastered that, they might occasionally wonder why the whole website seems to consist of just a title and a copyright line. This happens on websites where everything on the page is built using just images or hidden in drop-down menus that screenreaders can’t access.
The dog didn’t like it much either
I recently sat in on a training session as a blind man demonstrated how this software works. Just as well he couldn’t see the look of utter boredom on his own face as he surfed to the sound of Stephen Hawkins’s vocoder.
So this is just a problem for a tiny minority of web users? Wrong. Many other people find such websites difficult or just plain irritating to use. That’s just the start of it. Anyone looking at a website on a phone needs the site to be set out accessibly too, or else they just can’t use it. Whoops, there goes your audience.
So it’s essential to build sites that are accessible, and in fact governmental organisations and charities are now obliged to. There’s plenty of guidance around and standards that can be used to measure the different levels to which sites can conform. On the other hand, it’s not easy to meet all the standards without ending up with the worst site in the world for everybody else, with big blocky text and garish colours. It can be done when necessary, though. I think Action for Blind People is a particularly good example, by theOTHERmedia. Take a look one day. Or a listen.
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