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No.20 Good Manners and Accessibility (March 15, 2003)
The third topic of the year is accessibility.
With an increase in Internet access in 2003, the forecast is that the base of users will continue expanding to include more children, seniors, and people with disabilities. These users may be bewildered by sites that young people use with ease, and many may not be able to use sites at all. It will become even more important to have a firm understanding of the physical and cognitive characteristics of each type of user when creating a website.
 Consideration for seniors
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In particular, we can expect that seniors, many of whom are home-bound, will increasingly use the Internet. Many senior users have declining eyesight and decreased motor skills, making it difficult for them to read small text on the screen and perform fine mouse movements. To help them cope with these physical characteristics, make your font size adjustable for users. Also, make it easier for users to click links by expanding the link area.
In particular, using Flash or DHTML programming in which a menu appears on mouseover requires extremely fine mouse movements in order for a user to be able to accurately click on the desired item. Just as any person would trip on a bumpy road, this is not only extremely stressful for senior users, but also may cause young users to make mistakes. This type of design should be avoided as much as possible. (For more details, see Building Websites for Senior Citizens (Part 1) and Building Websites for Senior Citizens (Part 2).)
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Good manners and accessibility
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Some may think that since the users targeted by their website are young, they don't need to give any consideration to these issues. Naturally, you should determine your target users and provide the information that they need.
However, in cyberspace where we never know who will be accessing which sites, isn't it just plain-old good manners to take into consideration the readability and usability of your site so that as many people as possible can access it?
At least in the case of senior citizens, these users don't give up on viewing pages other than those created specifically for seniors, just because they are older. Just like young people, they want to see a variety of pages that they are interested in, and wouldn't find the Internet appealing if they couldn't do so. This is also true for children and people with disabilities. In fact, one of my friends who is 60 years old likes to browse sites such as MSN and other sites that are geared toward young people.
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Future trends
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In the United States, website design rules based on these concepts have been turned into law with the Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. As similar laws will most likely be passed in Japan in the future, the time to get a firm understanding of the most basic rules is now.
The fact is that by paying a little bit of attention to these issues when designing your site, you'll be able to increase the number of potential users. This should be viewed not from an obligatory viewpoint, but rather a challenge to take on with a positive outlook.
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