Website Accessibility Standards - Are You Breaking The Law?
About two million people in the UK have a sight problem or other difficulty (www.rnib.org.uk).
The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) develops strategies, guidelines, and resources to help make the Web accessible to people with disabilities.
The range of problems include visual impairment, colour blindness, dyslexia, inability to use a normal mouse.
Websites need to be designed and structured to ensure that all users can both understand and use the site.
Many accessibility features are easily implemented if they are planned from the beginning. Fixing inaccessible Websites can require significant effort, especially those that were not originally 'coded' properly with standard XHTML markup, and sites with certain types of content such as multimedia.
Our 10 Quick Tips below will help you to understand the main factors that make a Website accessible:
• Images & animations: Use the alt attribute to describe the function of each visual.
• Image maps: Use a client-side map and text for hotspots.
• Multimedia: Provide captioning and transcripts of audio, and descriptions of video.
• Hypertext links: Use text that makes sense when read out of context. For example, avoid 'click here.'
• Page organisation: Use headings, lists, and consistent structure. Use CSS for layout and style where possible.
• Graphs & charts: Summarize or use the longdesc attribute.
• Scripts, applets, & plug-ins: Provide alternative content in case active features are inaccessible or unsupported.
• Frames: Avoid using frames.
• Tables: Make line-by-line reading sensible. Summarise.
• Check your work: Validate. Use tools, checklist, and guidelines at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG
Some general checkpoints from the W3C guidelines that your web developer should satisfy:
• Style-use only proportional fonts for general public web-sites. The most common proportional font ranges are xx-small to xx-large (seven sizes) or percentage (%) though other proportional scales are available. The user will be able then use the View-Text Size option on their browser to change the font size to suit their conditions.
• Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element (e.g. via 'alt', 'longdesc', or in element content). This includes: images, graphical representations of text (including symbols), image map regions, animations (e.g. animated GIFs), applets and programmatic objects, ascii art, frames, scripts, images used as list bullets, spacers, graphical buttons, sounds (played with or without user interaction), stand-alone audio files, audio tracks of video, and video.
• Ensure that all information conveyed with colour is also available without colour, for example from context or markup.
• Clearly identify changes in the natural language of the document's text and any text equivalents (e.g. captions).
• Organise documents so they may be read without style sheets. For example, when an HTML document is rendered without associated style sheets, it must still be possible to read the document.
• Ensure that equivalents for dynamic content are updated when the dynamic content changes.
• Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site's content.
Contact us if you need advice on Web Accessibility.
Sincerely,
HeadChannel Ltd
www.headchannel.co.uk
Legislation:
• The Disability Discrimination Act 1995, Part III Access to Goods and Services
• Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001
• The Disability Discrimination Act 1995, Part IV Education
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