How to ensure your website is accessible and usable
Having an accessible website is not just a nicety, but a must
have. Although there are still issues with inconsistent display
of content across browsers, matters are much better than they
have been in the past. This means that there is no excuse not to
bear in mind accessibility when creating and updating your site.
Here are some accessibility tips to bear in mind whilst creating
your site:
Navigation You should resist the temptation to use images
or Flash for links on your site, and rather use text based
links. This helps with accessibility, search engine spidering
and ensures that navigation links can be traversed using the tab
key as well as the mouse. The ability to use the keyboard to
move around the site is an important accessibility requirement
to ensure those who cannot use a mouse for a variety of reasons
are not disadvantaged by your site.
Alt Tags Ensure all images have alt tags - or alternative
text - attached to them. This is a key accessibility
requirement, to ensure that those who cannot view images, or
choose to browse without images, can view all of your site
without disadvantage. Alt tags should be descriptive and
relevant to each image, rather than generic or used as a place
to stuff keywords that are irrelevant to the image. Keep them
sort and to the point - if the image is of a man parachuting,
then label it as 'man parachuting'. There is no need to prefix
with the word 'image:' as many text to speech browsers will add
this automatically, thus the listener will here 'image image' if
you also insert the word image!
Flash When it comes to accessibility, one of the biggest
barriers can be Flash. Flash must therefore only be used
sparingly and only to add nice to have touches rather than
important content. As well as being slow to load, Flash is often
stripped out by firewalls or switched off in the web browser.
The accessibility of Flash content is very poor as it is
impossible for a search engine to know what a Flash banner is
displaying. Therefore use Flash with caution.
Colours Be sensible with your colour scheme! Ensure that
you use colours that go well together and are easy on the eye.
Therefore don't use colours that clash, are too similar or too
light to be read easily on screen. There are tools you can use
to see how your colour scheme will look to those with various
types of colour blindness - well worth checking out.
Font sizing Ensure that if possible you do not fix the
font size, but rather allow site visitors to adjust font size as
per their requirements - either making it larger and easier to
read, or perhaps even smaller. Therefore don't set absolute
pixel sizing in your style declarations.
In summary be considerate for your whole audience, who will also
be using a variety of browsers and monitors to view your site.
It is therefore well worth running your site through a text only
browser such as Lynx to see how it displays there, and also run
your code through a code validator to ensure that any mistakes
are ironed out before you go live.