So last week, I visited the Infocomm Accessibility Centre at 24seven‘s invitation. The centre is designed to help disabled people to train in infocomm technology, so they have a shot at employment.

The visit was an eye-opening experience for me as a web designer, because it puts web accessibility into perspective. Web accessibility is the practice of designing a web page that is accessible by the assistive technology used by disabled people.

For more photos, visit Selwyn’s Flickr set.

Here are some examples of assistive technologies. The yellow keyboard is designed to have a high contrast so that people who are partly visually-impaired can see better. And the trackball mouse and joysticks are designed for those who suffer from movement-impairing disabilities such as stroke or muscular dystrophy.

In my last 15 years online, I’ve met many bloggers — some who are disabled. I never really thought about how difficult it is for some of them to go online because it didn’t occur to me that they were using anything else but a normal computer or a mobile device. So to be able to touch and play with these devices really put things into perspective for me — especially as a designer.

Often, in a midst of designing a site or even just writing a blog entry, we forget or simply ignore the details such as putting a simple alternate tag on an image. As able people, we tend to forget that there are many others who never get to visually experience the wonders of our design or photos. All it takes for us, as bloggers or designers, is to spend an extra 10 seconds to write a descriptive alt tag so they could have a chance to imagine what we’re sharing.

And then there’s the debate between making a site more accessible vs cutting some corners for aesthetics reasons (such as using Flash or nonstandard code). I’d like to be fair here. I think it depends on your site’s target audience. If you’re designing a government, banking or utility portal, I think it’s important absolutely necessary to have an accessible site because these organizations are serving essential services to general public; they should strive to treat all their stakeholders equally. But if you own a small-time blog like I do, I think you can relax a little. You don’t have to painstakingly conform every single line of code to the standard, but it’s good aim at least for the bare minimum, such as minimizing the unnecessary use of tables.

Anyway, I hope this entry will inspire other web designers and bloggers to give more thought about web accessibility. Web accessibility isn’t about being a code nazi or being inflexible; it’s about respect. Respect for your readers, respect for humanity, and respect for equal access by all.

To check whether your site is accessible, go to cynthiasays.com.

So readers, what do you think of web accessibility? Is it important for you? If you’re a designer by trade, how do you persuade your clients on the importance of web accessibility?

PS: If you’re Singapore and you’d like to support the cause, join the mass tweet meet on 26 June. And if you know disabled people, please nominate them for a course at the Infocomm Disability Centre. These courses give those who otherwise may not have the opportunity, a chance to finally become a fully-contributing member to society.

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A new theme at Nanyate?! will always be accompanied with some awesome new plugins. So here are the chosen ones.

1. @Reply with Comment Preview Plugin

Since I wanted to keep this design clean, I have reluctantly removed WordPress Thread Comments and WP Paged Comments. It is now replaced with a Twitter-esque comment system, where you place @name to reply to comments. This plugin allows you to display the comment you’re replying to when you hover the @name. To use it on Nanyate?!, click on “respond to this comment” in the comment box you want to reply to. The HTML code that displays the @name will then be transposed in the comment text area.

I personally don’t think that this plugin’s potential is fully maximized, since it is not very friendly to those who have no knowledge of HTML. I would much prefer to see something like [@name] than a line of HTML code. (Plugin author Marcus Himmel, you hear me?) Also, the CSS and the XHTML are neither easily accessible nor valid for those who those customizing Web Standards Nazis. With all that said, it’s still an innovative plugin that might catch on in the near future – provided that it is improved upon.

2. WordPress Mobile Plugin

With the advent of iPhone, HTC Dream and other mainstream internet browsing-centric phones, I think mobile web surfing will be the next big thing in the very near future, and likely the norm 2 – 3 years. So, it’s best to start catering to them now!

This plugin turns your site design into a mobile-friendly one, when it detects a reader is browsing from his or her phone. The CSS is fully customizable. In return, the author requests you put a small Google Mobile or Admob ad, and demands a small share of the revenue. Alternatively, you can pay the author 25 Euros to remove all advertising.

There are alternatives out there, but most of them route to another URL and place ads on them. Until a fully free mobile plugin is released, I think this plugin is a pretty good deal.

3. Author Highlight Comments (not a plugin)

I wanted better control of my comment highlights, so I dug out a couple links from my rusting favorites folder “design resource”, and lookey what I found: Matt Cutt’s Highlight Author Comments

It’s better than the plugin Highlight Author Comments, which does not allow for flexible CSS-styling. And better than most other tutorials that determines the author based on email, which would clearly be very vulnerable to impersonations. Matt Cutt’s tutorial bypasses all that by using the WordPress admin ID to determine the author. So unless the impersonator-to-be knows your password, you’re pretty safe.

Embarassing story: it took me a few hours to get this code working because I am PHP-stupid, and got so overwhelmed by the new code that I was completely oblivious to the error in my CSS. Long and boring story. Basically, it was my CSS that caused the problem, not the PHP.

Anyway, if you’re as PHP-stupid as I am, or afraid of tweaking your comments.php, please read this excellent step-by-step guide by Colin King; just don’t follow the author highlight tutorial given. Alternatively, feel free to ask this PHP-stupid web enthusiast, if you run into any trouble. Just leave me a comment or send me an e-mail.

Hope you found this WordPress plugins review useful!

Thank You, Commenters!

Lastly, I’d like to thank those provided feedback to my layout. Theme Torii is now in Beta release. I’ve made the header marginally smaller, and changed the footer. Theme Torii now works on the following browsers: Firefox 3, Opera, Internet Explorer 6 + 7, Safari and Google Chrome.

Related posts:

1. New WordPress Plugins!
2. New Theme Finalized, New Plugins & Code
3. Problematic WordPress Upgrade