Webmasters! Remember us Blind Folks.

Almost all website text is too small, and often too thin, for me to read easily, or at all.  Ctrl++ is my friend on the desktop, scaling that text up to size, and sometimes adding on a little Easy Read, (whichI’ve written about before).  I’ve yet to find a website that these easy Windows commands or simple plugins won’t work on.

But this isn’t always the case with my mobile web experience.  It seems a fair number of websites do not take into account accessibility for their mobile users, a segment of internet users that is only certain to increase going forward.

On the iPad, the equivalent of Ctrl++ in the browser is simply to pinch and zoom.  Unlike the desktop experience, however, the page can be made larger than the screen, necessitating the user swipe sideways to read each line of text. 

Likewise, plugins like Easy Read are replaced universally in the iOS accessibility features with an option to reverse all the colors, rendering most pages black with white text.  I set this function to be accessed with a triple tap of the home button.

But Apple has gone one step further with the reader in Safari, which works the same on OSX and iOS.  The reader extracts the text from the main article on a webpage, eliminating the ads and other text, and provides a larger, cleaner, reading experience for the user.  I still usually triple tap the home button to reverse colors for the easiest reading experience possible.

But, here’s the catch.  A lot of websites still don’t optimize their pages for the Safari reader.  I’m not sure why.  Is it a technical issue or just an oversight on the part of the webmaster?

Two very ironic examples who until the last week or so didn’t enable the reader in Safari were Cult of Mac and 9 to 5 Mac, sites devoted to every nuanced rumor about everything Apple.  (I couldn’t remember which site was still the holdout, so I went to see on my iPad and discovered the functionality was there since, like, yesterday).

Whether it’s a coding issue, or simply an oversight, I would implore webmasters to start thinking more about the mobile experience (and no that doesn’t always mean an app in place of the regular site) and to test the site with those of use with accessibility issues.