Our current site has very few pages in Spanish, but we hope to increase that number moving forward. In addition to local Spanish speakers, we’ve heard that some services regularly attract patients from inside Mexico, so it would stand to reason that the new cardiac center’s web presence, for example, should have a Spanish component.

Some health care sites do have Spanish versions, though the content seems sparse. But what about other languages? Our institutions are often located near communities with specific ethnic identities that we’ve completely overlooked. Are we missing an opportunity?

Obviously, it comes down to time and resources. You have to prioritize which services and features will be translated, and find a good translator. (Preferably one that knows web writing. ) Not to mention any technical intricacies.

I too thought, “I wonder if those text resizing tools are too small for sight-impaired people to see.” But I was also thinking of these tools from the perspective of my father. Sure, browsers also have resizing options, but my technologically-deficient father wouldn’t have the slightest clue those tools are there. So he would probably be more likely to see tools that are presented on the page. Making them prevalent enough to be seen even by those who aren’t necessarily looking for the tool is another issue.

And sure, it’s a boring topic, but it’s one that I’ve seen is neglected all too often. Plus, it’s a nice breather from the recent content-related topics.

(less than 1%…)

And I just reread what I first wrote and it seems like I came off as kind of a jerk – I would like to clarify that I wasn’t suggesting this was a boring topic of conversation. Just that it would be if I was at a party and someone was talking about it. Sarcasm and dry humor are so hard to convey across this medium of ours.

We’re currently at the end of the design phase of our site relaunch. One of the funny things that I noticed about a lot of the comps was that they featured text resizing tools but the tools themselves were small enough to where someone with vision problems would never find them.

Use alt/title attributes, set your line-height to 1.4em or greater, never dip below 1em for font size and aim for XHTML 1.0 strict.

The site itself looks nice and all – but take if you take a look at the code you’ll want to rip your hair out. Ick, I can’t imagine they had accessibility in mind when they were laying everything out.

Well the best we can do is keep chugging away at it – it’s a constant struggle – especially when it’s ‘easier’ or ‘faster’ to do it the old non-accessible way.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071003/ts_nm/target_blind_dc

This case could set new standards in Web design, and it will be prudent for healthcare organizations (and commercial organizations, alike) to watch this case.