After reviewing web accessibility and web usability guidelines, there are so many web-accessibility guidelines involving the complicated programming language for shifting from web accessibility to the web usability. Indeed if a web is universally usable then, of course, it is universally accessible. I will focus on web layout, text formatting, document format, and multimedia presentation in this short exploration.

I will start with the layout of a website because the biggest challenge of students with visual impairment, especially blind, is to navigate a website. If they use screen reader, sometimes they will not get the information in inaccessible website because of unreadable content or overloaded information (Mahmud, Borodin, Das, Ramakhrisman, 2007). According to Guidelines 1.3 and 3.23 of WCAG 2.0, we have to make simple and consistent navigation that make sure the website layout is understandable and it compatible with screen reader that linearly read throughout all the content in the layout. In addition to make user with screen reader can access direct to the content or main menu with out reading any unimportant link, a good web page navigation provide “skip-navigation link” which can be visible or not (Takagi, Asakawa, Fukuda, & Maeda, 2004).

I will put this exploration of website layout for students with visual impairment here because it will take a long exploration if I continue this one. In the next exploration I will investigate about web usability for sighted students with disabilities.

Mahmud, J., Borodin, Y., Das, D., & Ramakrishnan, I. V. (2007). Combating information overload in non-visual web access using context. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces. Retrieved from http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1216295.1216362.

Takagi, H., Asakawa, C., Fukuda, K., & Maeda, J. (2004). Accessibility designer: visualizing usability for the blind. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 6th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility.Retrieved from: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1028630.1028662

W3C. (2008). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. Retrieved 16 March, 2010, from http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-WCAG20-20081211.