Forum Moderators: phranque
If you had to recommend one accessible website design technique, what would it be?
Mine's would be'
Separate Design from Content using CSS + XML.
Accessibility is a good thing, but I don't worry about people without javascript.
UI is more important than web-to-speech (imo)
SPAN, you never noted your best accessibility tip!
Surely an oversight!
On the other hand, a while ago I read about 30% of internet users that don't know how to scroll...
I once saw a visually impaired person using a talking browser. The 1st site they visited had so many keywords in the alt tag that the page was less than useful, the second had nothing in the 'alts' and the browser kept saying something along the lines of "no information", again not very helpful.
Regards
John
You mention 9 different colourblindness things, well surely all thats needed is a stylesheet switcher that allows a visitor to change the contrast / colours / text size of the website, and you've got that issue sorted?
Yes accessibility is timeconsuming but surely the inclusiveness and seo benfits alone justify us taking the time to develop accessibility?
And you dont need to test with a screenreader - you should already know the main problems (spacer images + alt text etc) being in these forums!
Perhaps the best we can do is build sites that eradicate the obvious barriers to disabled people, but isnt that a good place to start?
That's a bit negative attitude you've got there or is it indicativeignorence of the true issue of accessibility (que big arguement - I've never had a dust up in a forum before! :)
A simple tip, add a meaningful 'alt' to all images that actually describe the image.
Actually, the "alt" attribute is required for valid HTML.
You can also add a "title" attribute which is supposed to be the popup tool-tip.
And yes, it's possible to change colors/contrast with a stylesheet switcher. You can change text size too. But don't give users a choice between 9px/10px/12px like you can see on every site that uses a stylesheet switcher for font sizes. That makes no difference and is ridiculous. People with bad eyesight may need up to 150px large fonts - or even larger.
Actually, the "alt" attribute is required for valid HTML.
How does JKMitchell's suggestion contradict that? And whether "alt" is required or not still doesn't enforce placing a meaningful value in there, which is what JKMitchell recommended doing.
I think I agree with you on every point....but surely we should be using ems or % for font sizes?
Hope I didnt upset you :) - youre obviously not ignorant of the problem (as I suspected!).
Cheers.
What are your thoughts on Liquid Layout for browser sizes?
Where are you in the world?
I'm still one who uses tables for backwards compatibility. I've always included alt tags, and laid out my tables in a LOGICAL order (one that if read by a reader the row order makes logical sense.) The only major changes I needed to make were the few pages with NESTED tables. The recommendation says something to the effect that if you need to use tables for layout, lay out the cells so that if read by a reader they read in a logical order, but do not ever ever nest tables.
Javascript is fine, so long as the page functions WITHOUT it and no links or other page content are buried in Javascript. On this site, was used mostly for opening new windows and positioning some elements, all "bonus" features. Remove the JS and the CSS, if the page still reads, you're probably OK.
Stick to a dark text, light background scheme to provide optimum contrast.
A "skip navigation" link is required at the front of any link structures that skips over the navigation links to the beginning of the content.
Tab through all content on the pages. If the tabbing order does not seem logical, use tabindex attributes to make it so.
The only thing required by 508 guidelines that kept kicking a validation error for me was the summary attribute for tables:
<table summary="layout table">
What I've always suspected turned out to be true: remove as much markup from your content as possible, move it into a style sheet, and validate your pages, and you will be VERY close to accessibilty already.
