Accessible software

For peo­ple with phys­i­cal dis­abil­i­ties, such as a miss­ing sense of sight or hear­ing or motor impair­ments, typ­i­cal bar­ri­ers arise and office work is asso­ci­ated with spe­cial chal­lenges. Acces­si­ble soft­ware should enable all employ­ees – includ­ing peo­ple with phys­i­cal dis­abil­i­ties – to process busi­ness trans­ac­tions or take calls in a call cen­ter, for exam­ple.

For this pur­pose, eye con­trol and a mouth mouse or a screen reader and a Braille dis­play, for exam­ple, can be a suit­able answer. Stan­dards such as ISO 9241 for the “Ergonom­ics of Human-​System Inter­ac­tion”, the “Web Con­tent Acces­si­bil­ity Guide­lines (WCAG)” of the World Wide Web Con­sor­tium and the Barrier-​free Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy Ordi­nance define guide­lines or cri­te­ria for barrier-​free soft­ware. Accord­ingly, the code of soft­ware appli­ca­tions must be barrier-​free so that screen read­ers can access the infor­ma­tion and dis­abled peo­ple can use assis­tive tech­nolo­gies. Fur­ther­more, bar­ri­ers in the user inter­face must be removed.

Clearly struc­tured user inter­faces that have paid atten­tion to acces­si­bil­ity stan­dards from the begin­ning have an increas­ingly eas­ier time achiev­ing acces­si­bil­ity because they can be rec­og­nized by assis­tive tech­nolo­gies.

• Open­ness with respect to oper­at­ing sys­tems and devices to ensure con­nec­tiv­ity with screen read­ers, read-​alouds, and other assis­tive tech­nolo­gies
• Open­ness with respect to scal­ing and ren­der­ing to allow for enlarge­ments, inver­sions, or par­tic­u­larly high-​contrast ren­der­ings
• Alt tags for non-​textual con­tent, such as images/​graphics
• Pre­vent­ing color as the sole means of con­vey­ing infor­ma­tion or induc­ing response
• Clear struc­tur­ing in the fron­tend to allow the text pas­sages to be read by screen read­ers
• Edit­ing of con­tent for selec­tion with­out infor­ma­tion loss
• Enabling the use of all func­tions via key­board to facil­i­tate the con­trol of peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties