What Do You See?

I see only the code behind the illusion. Anyone think of the Matrix? This past week has been a very emotional one for me. I knew that I was missing a lot of what a website actually looked like because I couldn't actually see it, but it never really hit me how much I was missing. What do you see when you look at the image on the left? And how about when you look at the image on the right? Would it surprise and possibly sadden you to know that a screen reader user sees these two images as identical when viewing them as a rendered HTML page?

It took me quite a while of chatting with family and friends, but my family finally found a way to describe what a website normally looks like in a way I could imagine and implement myself. My first shot at a website was very linear and looked more like a document of text with some headings and colours than like an actual webpage.

You may be wondering why I am writing this post, and there is a couple of reasons. First of all, it is important to understand how a blind or visually impaired user "sees" your website with a screen reader, and how you can best describe elements on the page if you needed to. Using keywords like border, headings, footer, main content, text colour, background colour, will help you describe things in a way that a screen reader user can picture. Whether you are trying to describe your website to a potential client or friend, or you are trying to help a screen reader user design a website, this is an important skill to practice.

The second reason I am writing this post is because I have come up with a kind of creative solution to how a screen reader sees a website. If you have clients or users that use a screen reader, you should want them to see how beautiful your website is, not linear and black and white. So, every website I design will have an action attached to the logo or banner that describes the page's visual features to a user. To try it, simply click on the banner at the top of this page!

This last week has taught me a lot, and I am feeling much more confident now than I did last Monday. All it took was some two way communication to figure out how the visual created by code can be described to someone who only sees the code. So next time you look at a webpage, really think, What DO You See?