Introduction to Website Accessibility
Basics, standards and validators
Conclusion

Basic elements of web accessibility

One way of seeing how accessible your page might be is to turn off the graphics and other multimedia capabilities of your browser on the site that you are working on and seeing how easy it is to use. Another way of testing this is to try using the text browser Lynx to browse your website. One step that will be helpful in creating an accessible page is validating your pages against current web standards.

Some of the barriers that people may face when they are viewing a website are: inability to be aware of information communicated using various multimedia formats, i.e. images, animation or audio. In order to make your website accessible and complete with the features and presentation that you desire, make use of technologies and techniques that will communicate your message. Options include:

1) Using the alt attribute providing text to load for images that can be spoken by a screen reader: similarly adding title and longdesc attributes can give further details.

2) Using CSS with structured HTML instead of tables to design layout.

3) Technologies and multimedia components such as Java, JavaScript and Flash may not be accessible to the user thus an alternative format will be needed. If you do use them, take advantage of any accessibility tools that are available.

Standards

The World Wide Web Consortium developed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: There are 3 different levels of compliance specified within these guidelines. A checklist of the requirements is included. This will provide details of the different areas a person should be concerned about. Sometimes developing a website according to guidelines is not just an option, but it is a requirement. This is particularly true in the case of sites developed for government institutions. The United States government has requirements for the websites it is responsible for in legislation referred to as Section 508

Validators

In order to help you with creating documents that conform to accepted standards, validators have been created to analyze and provide advice for accessible web documents. Bobby is one validator available that is used for checking documents. Due to the nature of the testing, these tools are not able to give a definitive pass/fail and usually require further inspection by the web developer. Be sure you also validate your HTML and CSS.

David Voth
http://www.cheamweb.com/Davi... (CWM member macfoto) enjoys web design and photography. His work includes Cheamweb: a site featuring photography from western Canada.