Monday, November 9, 2020

GARI – more information on mobile accessibility and better usability

Now that our lives have moved more online than ever before, information on features and functions that can help improve usability and interaction is even more useful. The GARI website can do just that and several recent improvements make that easier than ever. 

 

We spent the last few months on working to improve the usability of the GARI website and database based on feedback from our users. Here we present a short overview of the changes and improvements implemented over the past few months. 

 

In order to allow for better contrast control and facilitate very high contrast, new buttons in the top right corner of the GARI website enable to switch to a display of black text on white background or white text on black background. A third option allows you to switch back to the default layout. 

 

Just left to these new buttons, also in the top line of the website, new Zoom buttons have been added. You can still use the keyboard commands for your browser to zoom in and out of the page, or use these new buttons to do so. A reset Zoom button returns the page to the default display. 

 

Based on feedback from our visitors who use GARI with screen-readers, we have

implemented a skip link – to allow screen-reader users to move straight into the content of each page and avoid all of the menus and links at the top of each page. We also updated the page HTML language tags to match the language displayed so that screen-readers are able to read out the content in the correct language. The layout of the search pages was improved so that they print better, and all 19 language versions were reviewed for display errors, in particular those written in non-Latin alphabets. 

 

Additionally, we have started adding short videos to the GARI website explaining how to activate accessibility features in the devices. The first few videos describe: 

 

More videos will be added over the coming weeks and months. 

 

In collaboration with the Communications Regulatory Authority of the Republic of Lithuania (RRT), we also worked on adding Lithuanian to GARI – making it the 20th language that the site can be accessed in.  

 

Link to GARI: www.gari.info