Web access­ib­il­ity can be hard to get your head around. It’s all very well talking about best practise, but without personal exper­i­ence it can be very diffi­cult to under­stand the day-to-day issues people face.

I’m lucky, in that my eyesight is still 20/20. Yet today I ran head-on into a common web access­ib­il­ity barrier. I got a (diluted) taste of what it’s like to use a screen magni­fier to browse the web (like many vision-impaired users).

I was playing on the Wii and when I’d had enough of Super Mario Galaxy for the day, I jumped over to The Internet Channel (or Opera for Wii as us web monkeys know it).

I loaded Google Mail. Alas I have a relat­ively small televi­sion by today’s stand­ards, so the on-screen text was rather small. Thankfully, on the Wii it’s very easy to zoom in on a certain parts of the screen, so I did. I scrolled across to the Labels part of Google Mail and clicked one. Just as you’d expect, it updated the conver­sa­tions part of the page. No problem.

Well, no problem except for the whole zoomed in bit. Because the site is built using Ajax, there hadn’t been a full-page refresh. It meant I had no way of knowing something had happened elsewhere on the page until I zoomed out again.

Now, Google also offer basic HTML versions of their web applic­a­tions. These don’t use Ajax, so you get the full-page refresh (and hence you’re aware that the page has changed). That’s one way to solve the problem, but creat­ing separ­ate web applic­a­tions for differ­ent groups of users isn’t always an option.

I’m not saying Ajax is a bad thing — rather point­ing out one of it’s side effects. I’m not yet sure how I’d work around the problem (and I’d love to hear sugges­tions), but it’s certainly food for thought when design­ing for the web.