person centred accessibility

Trying to support my ethos of offering 'person centred and innovative developments combined' I embark on a journey that has taken me to all sorts of places in the search for knowledge. My learning curve widens, in promotion of my ethos of 'access for all' as depicted in my website http://www.person-centred-consultancies.com/

My feelings on inaccessibility started with my own experiences of not being able to do the stuff I wanted to do. This was in regards to just getting out there into community and public sector or private sector buildings with a pushchair. I learned that this was not the only way unequal access affected me. I was also realising that there were hardly any creches available and that the lack of street lighting and transport were a pain as well. I was being effectively 'socially and publicly excluded' from the stuff I wanted to do.

Now that I have a website. I worked on how to make the services I offer accessible to others. I will book venues that are accessible and ensure that the blocks to my greater participation are not the blocks to others.

However the actual website needs to be made accessible also. There are a range of ways of doing this but as I understand it since the disability discrimination act came into force, only 3% of websites are accessible on the net.

Text readers like browsealoud and others are available for those with visual impairments and I have made some contact with this organisation to support my efforts. However much more is needed to be done. The challenge for web designers is to learn what is necessary in order to ensure the websites they build are compliant.

I am by no means a web designer by trade, but my understanding of the wider aspcets of social and public exclusion was enough to inspire me to take on this too for my own website. Further, any consulting I offer, includes the need to 'think this through' adapt what people have, design with accesibility in mind and not run for a web 2.0 flash presentations that might exclude a vast number of people from the content on the site.

Jim Byrne's book sounds like a great start for my endeavours. '60 Hot To Touch Accessible Web Design Tips' available here at amazon or through his own website www.webaccesstips.co.uk/

This sounds like a good place to start for anyone equally wishing to offer an 'access for all' ethic in their website development and design.