Navigation for One In Five

One In Five for Sunday 12 May 2013

Add all to playlist

This week on One in Five, how accessible is your website ?

These days, you name it, the Internet has got it, but some people living with disabilities may only be enjoying a fraction of what's available.

In 2008, New Zealand ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

This calls for the disabled community to have equal access to information and communications technologies, including the Internet.

Yet many websites are poorly designed and fail to provide captioning or sign language for those in the deaf community.

Likewise, some sites still lack the coding that allows content to be picked up by a blind user's screen reader. 

Katy Gosset gets on line with the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind and Deaf Aoteoroa to find out what works, what doesn't and what web designers can do to bridge the gap.

Photos of Petronella Spicer with her guide dog and Lisette Wesseling with her Braille Note Taker.
Left: Petronella Spicer with her guide dog. Right: Lisette Wesseling with her Braille Note Taker.