True web accessibility for the Issmeister

Over the many years that I have been surfing the internet, it has become relatively clear that websites have made leaps and bounds in accessibility; negating the early issues which made it hard for the average user to navigate through a site. These days there are things they call “best practices” for usability and accessibility and we now label those mishaps we saw in 1995 (some we still see today) as ‘bad practices’.
Those methods labeled as ‘best practice’ are only so because these methods have been implemented several times and have been successful in terms of interaction with various user-types (from beginners to advanced users) but I still feel the term ‘best practice’ is misinforming as it may be the best practice currently, but there is still room for improvement on these practices.

I found myself sitting next to my father (the Issmeister), helping him out with looking for some cars on carsales.com.au. I was astonished at how incompetent he was in actually navigating around this website. He firstly had no idea how to fill out a form with more than a single field. Eventually with some aid I made him fill out the fields and walked off. I came back and found him still sitting at the form all filled but looking for a button to click to submit the form. I stood there behind him in utter disbelief as his mouse cursor hovered over the ‘Search Now’ button several times until he eventually went to the top-right corner of the window and just closed the browser. My Dad loves buying and selling cars and I’m sure there are copious amounts of Issmeisters with the same ability in using computers and the same love for cars. Let’s pigeonhole them and say that carsales.com.au lose all this demographic because they can’t use the website properly. When we see this:

Carsales.com.au as we see it

The Issmeister sees this:

The Issmeister is fine with using Google, and reading news articles but as soon as there is too much stimulus on the screen, his eyes totally fail him. It occurred to me though, after surfing millions of websites which all follow these best practices, you become accustomed as to what to expect on a site and can therefore distinguish a button from an image, or a form field from a bordered box…..but there are those who are new to the internet like Issmeister that just have no clue.

Now I’m not saying it would be a valid option for all websites but adding a bit more accessibility for websites with demographics such as old folk, outback farmers etc. would surely be appreciated. One of the methods I thought of was to provide an opening dialogue for those sites…

Intro dialog box

This page will take out any styling which may confuse our most basic internet users. If nothing is done over the span of 1 minute on this first introductory page the site will load at its highest accessibility level:

Basic styling and overload of aids

The same principle is used on this page. Very basic, making sure the buttons have been highlighted in colour and helpful text with arrows.

Same thing...

Instead of overwhelming a simple user with more than one form field at a time, break it up so they only have to read a short sentence and answer one question before looking for a button.

Don't present too much information on the site. This confuses him

Even though these users don’t like a lot of text on screen, they are more than capable of reading large volumes of text in email. This is where the site should provide larger packets of information.

Now I showed my idea to the Issmeister and he said… “See, now that I can use!” He is wondering why all sites aren’t catered to him in this way. I’m thinking if carsales.com.au worked in such fashion, the Issmeister would be their number one customer.

Who wants to help me make websites like this?