Dining in the dark and web accessibility
Thursday, March 10, 2005
NPR’s Morning Edition today had a story about the Blind Cow restaurant in Zurich, where diners eat in complete darkness, served by blind and partially-sighted staff.
This set me thinking about web accessibility (because that’s the sort of person I am).
One of the aims of the restaurant is to give people an insight into life without sight - we try to do a similar thing when doing web accessibility training.
A friend of mine gets all the people attending his training session to try and book a flight on an airline website without using their mouse - a standard task for someone with motor impairments.
Even running the site you’ve been slaving over through a text-only browser can be a chastening experience. Hierarchies and navigation that makes perfect sense in a modern browser with lots of graphics and JavaScript functionality can appear broken and chaotic.
Switching off the monitor and just using a screen-reader also focuses the mind wonderfully on improving the way the site functions under all sorts of circumstances that people face every day.
Another aim of the restaurant is to get people to appreciate the sensual experience of food without an over-reliance on sight. Even a salad becomes a different thing when you’re exploring each of the elements in the dark, trying to work out what’s in front of you.
And I wonder if some of this translates to the web. There’s a beauty in clear structure and expertly-written content that’s often literally overlooked, when we focus on the purely visual in web design.
A site that communicated well not just visually but also in other, more purely semantic ways - that would be something to see. And hear, and experience in as many other ways as we can think of.