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High aims indeed.
But 'making content understandable' is irrelevant to many sites, and
impossible for most.
If someone has a site about nuclear physics or quantum mechanics or
loads of
other topics, do I get hot under the collar if I can't understand it? Is
it
reasonable to expect that I should be able to understand it?
To take this a few steps further, for an illiterate and deaf person, all
sites with text are inaccessible and cannot be repaired.
To understand any site requires a prerequisite of education. What makes a
site inacessible in this area is poor grammar, unnecessarily dense
language, or other matters which can be reasonably corrected. This does
not mean we must never have sites on technical matters, or on a finer
point of history or sociology which requires a background of knowledge to
understand.
Just because you, with your scientific background, cannot understand a
page does not in itself make the page not "understandable".
Answers on a
pixel, please.
It's a big pixel. Sorry.
It's clear and simple that the person who thought up that one hadn't
done much work with people with even moderate learning difficulties: any
content suitable for that audience would be tedious in the extreme for
everyone else. Teachers don't write the same materials to suit the whole
ability range, so why would web designers?
This is an important point. One page on Abraham Lincoln cannot satisfy
both the 10-year-old looking for information for his first research
project and the grad student seeking specifics for a thesis. Clearly one
or the other, or yet another, target must be decided. However, the
language should be clear and understandable for that target.
I'm not sure the intent here is to make one content which is useful to
everyone - in fact it's extremely likely your page will face a healthy
percentage of internet users who will never have use for your site.
I think I was teaching for about five years before I realised that
plenty of
children who seem to be able to read are only reading 'mechanically' -
they
haven't a clue what the words or phrases actually mean. When watching
'mainline' films (="movies") many absolutely haven't a clue what it's all
about. In fact, my school had a couple of actors following the 'bottom
first
years' (age c12) round for a day: it was certainly an eye opener for
them!
As a teacher as well, comprehension must be a major component of any
literacy education, of course. We live in a time where people don't have
the time to read to their children, where everything goes so fast we
cannot hope to keep up. This is not the place, however, to go into how we
should teach literacy, except to say that the strategies have been
improving and need to continue to improve.
It may be theoretically possible to accommodate most (all?) sorts of
physical differences in one site, but extremely unlikely to accommodate a
wide range of learning differences and retain interest and stickability
for
both extremes.
Agreed - so the correct strategy must be to decide on a target and write
for it. A site selling Hello Kitty stuff and an in-depth discussion of the
character analysis of a Shakespeare play will certainly have little
overlap in their target audience. (And I don't think either target would
expect the other site to be a "comfortable" read.) A page comparing the
concepts of Machiavelli to modern-day governments might be written to
either target, depending on the intent of the authors.
Essentially, what the above accessibility guideline expresses is a
sensitivity to the readability issue, and a directive to do whatever is
practical to make the copy understandable to as wide a target audience as
is possible, while still not compromising the purpose of the page.
