Modern Internet with the eyes of the blind - Headers

Introduction

Good day. I think that accessibility is a familiar word to many IT specialists (I do not consider myself to be a specialist, since I have no education in this area, I am an amateur). For some, accessibility is familiar, as an abstract concept of accessibility. Someone works with it every day, and someone uses it every day.

In our world there are, in addition to physically high-grade people, people with disabilities (persons with disabilities), often called philistines, are cripples. You can face them anywhere. A stroller walking in the park or buying groceries in a large supermarket. Blind with a cane, walking all in the same park, next to work on the route known to him. Deaf and dumb, which very often can not be distinguished from an ordinary person, until you talk to him.

As is clear from the title of the article, the story is about the blind. The inhabitants are accustomed to the fact that blind people travel by public transport, go to shops and walk in the park, but for many people it is an incredible idea that they use computers in their daily lives. The question immediately arises: how do they use it if they do not see anything? How can they see the mouse cursor and read articles on the Internet, how can they type text when they don’t see it at all? The answer is very simple - by ear.

I suppose that someone knows about this and today there are already quite a lot of such people. At least here, on Habré, there have already been articles in which the general principle of the interaction of a blind user with a computer is mentioned. In order not to take precious time, I turn to the essence of this article.
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Again, as is clear from the title of the article, today we are talking specifically about the use of the Internet by the blind, and more specifically, about an important element of navigation on web pages.

Lyrical digression

Young people sitting in public transport with smartphones, they hunched and stared at the screen. This picture is familiar to very many people. More than half of these seated people are at this moment on the world wide web. Any modern inhabitant of our planet can not do without e-mail, all kinds of portals, forums and other communication sites - sources of information. Blind, too, requires information, even to some extent, it is required more than ordinary people. Blind people also chat on forums, read articles, ask Yandex and Google stupid questions, watch / listen to videos on YouTube, view news feeds and email. They do a lot of daily operations, which are used to any person working in the office.

For the blind has always existed, there is and will be the problem of access to information. Today we get its lion’s share from the world wide web. There are a wide variety of portals and resources that are interesting to one or another people. Information is distinguished not only by its informative and usefulness, but also by its convenience and accessibility.

They are not as simple as they seem.

I decided to start a story about the specifics of using the Internet by blind people with headlines, because this is a very simple, convenient and fast way to increase the accessibility and readability of your site. To my great regret, half of the pages of the Runet do not have any headlines at all, or have, but in the form of the title of the entire site and no more.

Headlines invented a long time ago. This is a very simple and convenient way to select blocks of information that need attention. The headline is headline for something, for example, to start this article.

Why is the presence of headers on the site so important for the blind?

Here it is necessary to clarify a little the principle of interaction of the blind with a web page in the browser. The main tools for navigating through the elements of the page are the arrows on the keyboard. They move the cursor. The cursor is a frame that is not always even visible. The mouse does not move at all.

The general structure of the site is as follows: vertical or horizontal menu, content area, right menu or additional links area, basement. When a sighted person finds the desired page on the network, he goes directly to the information in the content zone and starts reading. The blind person, however, scans the page linearly, from beginning to end, moving along it using the up / down arrows on the keyboard. In general, it is not interesting to read the entire menu of the site, all the information in the left column, a person needs to go to the desired information immediately, to the article that he wants to read. Headlines help with that.

By pressing certain keys on the keyboard, you can quickly navigate through the page headers and even list them in a separate window.

Headers allow you to quickly navigate through the article and the page zones. It is very convenient and time saving.
On many sites, the headings are visually present, but in fact these are paragraphs with CSS headings. Paragraphs elements div and span are not voiced at all, only textual information contained in them is voiced. That is, on pages built on the visual principle, where everything is designed just for the type of headings, it becomes impossible to perform quick navigation. Any blind person has to spend a lot of time quickly scrolling through a heap of useless information. And imagine, in addition to the sound of the text, links, buttons, the system voices all the form fields, graphics, lists of frames, and many other elements. All this set of elements is indicated by voice messages with relevant information, that is, the amount of information being scrolled increases several times. Very often, there is no desire to read the desired information on such sites, because until you get to it, you will not read anything at all!

For a very good example to go far is not required. To take this page, you need to press only one key, and the transition to information that is interesting to the person will be made, the cursor will pass the top of the site and will be on the first level heading, which “titles” this article. Next arrow go to the text and start reading.

Here is another example. On pages of this resource, where lists of articles are presented, there is a lot of heterogeneous information. These are rather long pages, and imagine if the headlines of articles on Habré would have been designed only by visual indication! Whatever it is not a convenient resource! With a very impressive amount of information passing through it, his reading would be difficult for the blind. And when there are headlines you can read the entire page in less than a minute just scrolling through them, select interesting articles and read. If there were no headlines, it would take half an hour to read one page, because the number of elements on these pages exceeds a thousand.

What i wanted to say

With this article I want to draw the attention of people who are engaged in web design and layout of sites to the need to use headings to highlight important information, to highlight sections of pages. This is an extremely convenient navigation tool for thousands of blind users, who may be half the audience of your site.