Ken McGuire

Accessibility On The Web

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Ken McGuire

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Different jobs call for different rules…. If you’ve never come across the W3C Accessibility Guidelines I would suggest a read… Time for an educational lesson today!
In brief…

  1. Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content
  2. Don’t rely on color alone
  3. Use markup and style sheets and do so properly
  4. Clarify the usage of natural language
  5. Create tables that transform gracefully
  6. Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully
  7. Ensure user control of time-sensitive content changes
  8. Ensure direct accessibility of embedded user interfaces
  9. Design for device-independence
  10. Use interim solutions
  11. Use W3C technologies and guidelines
  12. Provide context and orientation information
  13. Provide clear navigation mechanisms
  14. Ensure that documents are clear and simple

The above points, explained in detail are available here from Sitepoint. You might also want to take a look at the W3C’s own site, or even Microsoft’s Accessibility Website

Comments

2 responses to “Accessibility On The Web”

  1. Pavlos Avatar
    Pavlos

    Accessibility is very important in web design. And not just because the law protects the right of people with disabilities to access information. Think of all the different devices (PDAs, mobiles), different operating systems, screen resolutions, web browsers etc that people may use to get to a website! Would it be accessible enough to all?

    Bluntly, no, it wouldn’t. Not in most cases. But keeping things xhtml and css valid, helps to make everything accessible to a lot more people and devices.

  2. Ken Avatar
    Ken

    Sure does… its just thats start to get yourself in the habit of making everything xhtml compliant and validated, shake off the old habits!

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