Personalization for Accessibility

gistfile1.md

Personalization for Accessibility

I'm looking for web apps or online experiences that offer personalization options to users with the intent to improve accessibility, such as increased font-size, variable color scheme or layout (for example, always give me mobile). Thoughtful implementations would persist after users leave the site, so their desired settings would still be there when they came back.

Trello has an "Enable Color Blind Friendly Mode". It's pretty simplistic and probably not that useful, but their hearts are in the right place.

Have you seen any applications that do well with this type of offering?

We have high contrast styles and a different gradebook for screenreader users (grids are such a pain, we made an optimized experience for blind users).

@rpflorence that is awesome, thank you. Is there a place I can check those out?

Google+ has an “accessibility” option. When you are logged in, you can find it in https://plus.google.com/u/0/settings.

It says:

Change the presentation of some pages to work better with screen readers and other assistive tools.

What it really does: it switches the layout to single column mode. The overall accessibility of the site is still very poor. Links are not links, but <span> elements with onclick handlers. There is no complete main stream view, the default font size is very small and so on.

While not specifically an online experience, one of my previous projects included a CSS style switch for colorblind users in a console view what was basic HTML. Under the default, error messages showed in red so they could be identified quickly in a sea of stdout messages and success messages were green.

In the colorblind mode, error messages were switched to a golden yellow and success messages were blue.

The switch was accomplished just by adding a class to the main console container.

This is actually pretty hard. I can think of a number of iOS apps that have accessible / "VoiceOver" modes that you can turn on. But web apps specifically that do this is challenging..

By the way it's funny that Trello includes this in their web app when their iOS app is not all that VoiceOver friendly...at least in my experience..