E-Commerce for People with Disabilites

[Buskerdoo]

I tried to research this and got overwelmed with all the info that didn't answer my question.

Is there a standard for how ecommerce should be laid out for useability reasons.

ie. products all in one column vrs two columns

any links to where I can study this?

[LazyJim]

There are no "this column for x, that column for y" rules written or unwritten, thankfully.

Visually people expect navigation, headings, search boxes, etc in particular areas of the screen.

But to ensure accessibility you just need to make sure the whole site makes logical sense when linearised, and with no sounds or graphics, - just as if someone was reading the site out to you and you said "yeah click that link", "ok skip to this paragraph" and stuff like that.

So if each section in linear order has a heading like "navigation menu", "shop browsing area" and "shopping cart" then these are like sign posts for blind, seeing, or whatever people might be using the site.

To get an idea of how sites are when linearised, see the Lynx web viewer, and good luck!

[Buskerdoo]

Thanks

[rritoch]

Originally Posted by Buskerdoo

Is there a standard for how ecommerce should be laid out for useability reasons.

There is a standard by w3c called WAI - Web Accessibility Initiative, but I haven't found it very helpful.

I've been working on making my online community handicap accessible. I've been using simply web 2000 as my guideline, and there are a few things I've found make a big difference. One is avoiding tables as much as possible, and two is using title and alt tags. One "trick" I've used since my site is xhtml compliant, is to use a xml viewer on the "data" which makes up the page. This has helped me arrange data more logicly and remove un-necissary tags. Simply web 2000 breaks up any text which is altered by tags, for example, <b>T</b>wenty^tm would be read as "Tee" "wenty" "tmmm". In this case it would be better to bold the entire line, and replace tm with trademark, ending up with <b>Twenty</b>^Trademarked which would be read as "Twenty" "Trademarked".

I've written an article in my online community about making sites more handicap accessible and am also looking for feedback on ways to improve the handicap accessibility of the site.

[docquesting]

Use xml voice technology. That would be one way to help. As for me and anyone else just keep things simple.