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Inclusive New Media Design
Inclusive New Media Design is a research project which aims to identify the best ways to encourage web designers and developers to build websites accessible to people with intellectual disabilities.
Changes to the Disability Discrimination Act in 2004 made it unlawful to discriminate against disabled people in recruitment and employment, and in service and education provision. Inclusive New Media Design offers an excellent opportunity for web professionals to equip themselves with the skills and knowledge needed to avoid discriminating in these areas through our free training workshops.
Inclusive New Media Design focuses on web users with intellectual disabilities because they form a significant part of the web user community, but their accessibility needs are often overlooked. It concentrates on the different accessibility requirements of this group compared to physically disabled web users and looks at whether the WCAG guidelines address the requirements of this user group.
Inclusive New Media Design is being run from The Rix Centre for Innovation and Learning Disability at the University of East London, a centre of excellence for consultancy and research in accessible web design. It is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Designing for the 21st Century initiative. The project is led by Dr Helen Kennedy.
Some accessibility sites are downright ugly, but the problem lies with those sites’ designers and not with accessibility, which carries no visual penalty.
Jeffrey Zeldman, Designing with Web Standards, 2003
Although serving the needs of people with disabilities should of course be a concern, the far wider issue – that accessibility is a matter of usability – has rarely been discussed. As designer professionals, we should be designing our content so it is globally accessible and meets the needs of as many people as is possible and practical given our specific circumstances, regardless of their abilities or the type of device they choose to access the Web
Andy Clarke, Transcending CSS: the fine art of web design, 2006
