Keeping Features Accessible

Glossary

• Accessibility: The extent to which computers are easy to use and available to a wide range of users, including people with disabilities.

The purpose of internationalizing your software is to make it easy for as many people around the world as possible to use it. Designing for accessibility has the same purpose—and many features that place software within reach of people with visual, aural, cognitive, or mobility impairments also help prepare it for localization. For example, dialog boxes with a simple design and minimal text are easier to translate and easier for some people with visual impairments to read. Addressing accessibility issues in your product specification will result in a product with a larger potential worldwide market. Just as with internationalization, designing your product to be accessible from the start saves you from having to redesign it later—and possibly from having to release special editions.

Detailed guidelines for designing accessible applications for Microsoft Windows are published in the chapter titled "Special Design Considerations" in The Windows 95 SDK, available through the Microsoft Developer Network. Selected recommendations for creating applications that are both accessible and global are listed below.

• Avoid overly complex designs. They are difficult to see and difficult to translate.
• Use dialog tab controls instead of creating large dialog boxes. Expansive dialog boxes can cause you to run out of accelerator keys, which are essential to people who cannot use a mouse. Translations of lengthy text might not fit on the screen.
• Use color carefully. Some people with visual impairments have a hard time distinguishing between certain colors and shades. The symbolism of certain color combinations varies by culture. If possible, allow for customization.
• Display warnings or messages until the user dismisses them. People with visual disabilities or language difficulties might need extra time to read them.
• Draw text on bitmaps using the Win32 API. Screen-review utilities designed for people who are blind cannot read text that is part of the bitmap itself. Bitmaps with embedded text must be translated.
• Allow for customization of keyboard accelerators and shortcut-key combinations. Some combinations are difficult for users with physical impairments to type or are not available on all international keyboards.
• Use on-screen keyboards. (See Figure 2-5.) They are beneficial for people who have physical impairments or whose keyboard drivers don't correspond to their keyboards' physical layouts (for example, a French keyboard paired with an Arabic keyboard driver).
• Use standard Windows controls and mechanisms. Screen-review utilities can read only standard controls. Customized controls or mechanisms are hard to localize because they require customized localization tools.

Figure 2-5 An on-screen keyboard.