Guidelines for Accessible and Usable Web Sites: Observing Users Who Work With Screen Readers

Our focus has been understanding how blind users work with Web sites and what that means for designers and developers. Our focus therefore is users rather than specific Web sites. In the following sections we describe insights gained from our observations and we present guidelines that can help designers and developers both meet the letter of the law and actually make Web sites usable to people who listen to screen readers. Following the guidelines that come from this study should take no more time or effort than developers are now spending to get a good score from an automatic program like Bobby or LIFT while doing a better job of meeting people's needs. Several lessons learned are presented.