The word on the street lately is that accessibility is the "next big thing" about to break on the scene. With CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allowing finer control of layout and effects, Web publishers are starting to discover that they have some pretty powerful tools already in their hands to make the Web accessible to all.

But, you ask, what does this have to do with me? The answer: every person with a webpage has reason to be concerned with accessibility. Making your pages accessible not only helps surfers who use devices like screen readers, but it also helps people who use text-only browsers or surf with graphics turned off. Making your pages accessible is so easy, there's no reason not to do it. Here are seven easy steps to making your pages as easy to access as possible.

1) Make sure all of your images have ALT text.

For images that don't need alternate text (for example, spacer images), use a space in place of any actual text. This helps everyone who has occasion to view websites without images, including people with slow modems, blind people or people using text browsers.

2) Check your table backgrounds.

Are you using tables with background colors behind text? A bug in Netscape causes the user to be unable to override these colors, which can make the text in your tables unreadable to people with visual disabilities who depend on their browsers overriding whatever colors are actually on the page. Until this is fixed, you're probably safer avoiding table background colors or images, at least behind text. There are a number of major sites (including Yahoo! and Altavista) that do this, and I've heard from one such surfer that it's "very annoying."

3) Provide text-based navigation.

Imagemaps are pretty, but they're a big problem for people who can't load or see images. In fact, if you use images at all for navigation, it's a good idea to provide a text alternative to the navigation or a text-only version of your site.

Four: use the NOFRAMES tag to give a useful alternative to your frames.

Don't use the NOFRAMES tag to tell your visitors to "get a modern browser." That's not helpful. Use it to include a list of links to your content so that everyone can see what you have to offer, or something of the like. Your visitors who can't view frames will thank you, I promise. This has the added benefit of enabling your site to be indexed by major search engines such as Altavista, which otherwise will not index your site.

5) Use "mailto:" links in addition to an e-mail form.

Forms cause all sorts of havoc with screen readers. Make sure you're using a "mailto:" link as well if you've got to have a form.

6) Get your "Bobby Approved" icon.

Head out to http://www.cast.org/bobby/ and run all of your pages through their checker. Follow their recommendations. Once you've implemented all their suggestions, you can place the Bobby icon on your page with pride!

7) Table less with CSS.

Tables are great for initial layouts for some.  But do not stop there.  Once you have everything looking just great, convert to table less and use CSS.  Just look under the "hood" or the source code for an inline CSS.  Other methods are reusable.

Footnote: Early in 2009 Yahoo announced that free personal web pages would no longer be offered.  Therefore It's All About Accessibility by Magdalen would be lost to antiquity and is preserved as a historical footnote.  Not only out of sentiment, but as a futuristic approach to web page building giving credit to those in the early years of the internet who truly cared about and understood accessibility before becoming main stream.

 

Feb. 10 1998