Neuropsych Now: One Year In
Neuropsych Now is officially one year old! We want to thank everyone for all of the suggestions, feedback, contributions, and support over the past year. Neuropsych Now has become a greater success than we had hoped because of these things.
To mark this occasion, we have decided to make a significant change by increasing and enhancing the accessibility of the Neuropsych Now site. So, what does that mean? It means that we are going to make the content on each page of the site more accessible to visitors with various disabilities and/or limitation(s). Perhaps a better description comes from the introduction for the W3C’s web content accessibility guidelines, which states that adhering to the guidelines covers:
“a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible…to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these.”
Sound familiar? We cannot speak for everyone, but to us these descriptors match exactly the people we see clinically, week in and week out. No doubt, many people who have previously visited this site have exactly these disabilities in some form or another. Perhaps you do.
It is important to note that that none of the aforementioned guidelines provided by the W3C come pre-baked with any web site or web site-creation generator. This means that all of these enhancements must be hard-coded into the source of each web page. So, achieving our goal of greater accessibility is not one that we are going to reach in the next week, or even in the next month. Indeed, it will be its own, ongoing project.
The secondary goal for doing this is to encourage others to make the same efforts for their websites. Although we are not alone in our stance, it is worth saying that everyone should have an equal opportunity to access information on the web. There is no compelling argument against this.
Meeting each of these accessibility criteria means a bit of extra work on our part. It is, however, absolutely doable and absolutely imperative: tacitly, passively denying access to content is irresponsible from our end, and we can do better.
Thank you, again, and we look forward to another year of doing our part and working with you to learn and know more about this, our chosen field of Neuropsychology.
Learn More. Know More.
