Colorblind, Law, and Lightboxes

Color Sensitive

I usually shy away from About.com, but I recently came across a piece worth mentioning. In the article Are Your Web Pages Color Sensitive? from the HTML/Web Design section, Jennifer Kyrnin provides some good information and techniques for web development with color blindness in mind. Here are some good tips from Jennifer:

• Don’t use only color to indicate something specific on your page.
• Desaturate your images to see if they still have impact.
• Avoid placing red and green together.
• If you can, find a color blind friend or relative to look at your site.

Did you know that color blindness is an issue with 8 to 12% of males of European origin?

Law Needed

In his blog Yes, we need accessibility laws, Eric Eggert gives an argument for why we need better laws for web accessibility. He states that a good accessibility law should do:

• Create awareness.
• Do not create a climate of fear.
• Create mediations.
• Reference international standard.
• Be inclusive.

Lightboxes

In the article Lightboxes and keyboard accessibility from 456 Berea Street, Roger Johansson describes how a lightbox should function with a keyboard. He states:

• Let me use the left and right arrow keys to step through images in a slideshow.
• When I press Esc, close the lightbox.
• Do one of the following:
  • Either add focusable elements (links or buttons) for close/next/previous, put keyboard focus on the first focusable object in the lightbox, make sure I can’t tab to something behind the lightbox, and make it visually obvious which object has keyboard focus.
  • or close the lightbox when I press Tab.
• When the lightbox closes, return keyboard focus to where it was when I opened it.

In addition, Roger cites the following two articles:

• Building a Better Lightbox by Josh Habdas.
• The Trouble with Lightbox (and its Variants) by Jonathon Christopher.