Signs & symbols
Last month the Children’s Society launched a site aimed at children with learning difficulties, called Askability. It has been designed to display the content of the website in a pictorial language (Widgit Rebus Symbols) as well as text.
Out of curiosity I wandered over to one of the companies involved in the production of the site - Widgit - to find out what they did and came across their symbol browser - Webwide.
This takes the alternative approach to displaying a website using this language - and for the vast majority of us the more realistic approach. Rather than the Askability model of having software sitting on the web server that produces the symbols, the browser on the user’s computer does all the work.
The sample screenshots that they provide are useful examples of how content on a website can be picked up, stripped of any styling and then redisplayed. For content providers the key point is ’stripped of any styling’ - and this is why the issue of understanding web accessibility is so important for them (see the guide we’ve started for the detail of what’s involved).
So for example with the middle set of images from RecipeLand.com (you can see the page in your own browser) the fact that the ‘Ingredients’ and ‘Directions’ are marked up as headings (rather than just styled paragraphs) means that Webwide knows what they are and can decide to treat them in a different way when it displays the page in Text or Symbol view. However the ‘Notes’ is just a plain bit of text so that would be treated as any other paragraph of content on the page.
So when you’re thinking about adding content to your site it’s more than just worrying about the words and the visual styling.
