The Escapist viewed as grayscale. [http://graybit.com/files/graybit.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.escapistmagazine.com%2Fforums%2F]
Gotten pretty interested in this aspect of web-design as of late, being on a course of the same at present. One thing that came up was contrast, especially how it related to people with varying types of color--blindness. The above link, despite looking like what The Escapist would look if it were in the days of black & white cinema, is actually a tool designed to show up the contrast of page elements, i.e. what looks perfectly okay in the full color version may not be so distinct in the grayscale.
This is obviously quite important when taking into account how people with certain kinds of visual difficulties are going to see your page.
Secondly, there's this little doodad: http://www.checkmycolours.com/, which unlike the above, actually goes through each individual element on the page and scores it accordingly based on contrast, brightness and color difference, giving a friendly tick for elements that pass and an unhappy X for those that don't. Actually, when I put in the URL for The Escapist, the majority of it's elements failed. (This was only a single page I tested though mind you.)
And, of the few other websites I tried, pretty big and well established ones too also failed.
But, my questions are mainly, what do people think of accessibility features in general? Are they useful? Is it worth the time for all websites to be as accessible as possible, or just some websites? Keeping in mind of course that accessibility for the visually impaired is just one aspect of it, you've also got to think of things like screen-readers (for the hearing impaired) and braille output devices (for the more severely visually impaired).
Personally, I'm generally understanding accessibility as a -good- thing. People shouldn't be excluded from the internet because of their difficulties, although, I do also realise that making a website fully accessible does take a bit of extra work too.
Gotten pretty interested in this aspect of web-design as of late, being on a course of the same at present. One thing that came up was contrast, especially how it related to people with varying types of color--blindness. The above link, despite looking like what The Escapist would look if it were in the days of black & white cinema, is actually a tool designed to show up the contrast of page elements, i.e. what looks perfectly okay in the full color version may not be so distinct in the grayscale.
This is obviously quite important when taking into account how people with certain kinds of visual difficulties are going to see your page.
Secondly, there's this little doodad: http://www.checkmycolours.com/, which unlike the above, actually goes through each individual element on the page and scores it accordingly based on contrast, brightness and color difference, giving a friendly tick for elements that pass and an unhappy X for those that don't. Actually, when I put in the URL for The Escapist, the majority of it's elements failed. (This was only a single page I tested though mind you.)
And, of the few other websites I tried, pretty big and well established ones too also failed.
But, my questions are mainly, what do people think of accessibility features in general? Are they useful? Is it worth the time for all websites to be as accessible as possible, or just some websites? Keeping in mind of course that accessibility for the visually impaired is just one aspect of it, you've also got to think of things like screen-readers (for the hearing impaired) and braille output devices (for the more severely visually impaired).
Personally, I'm generally understanding accessibility as a -good- thing. People shouldn't be excluded from the internet because of their difficulties, although, I do also realise that making a website fully accessible does take a bit of extra work too.