Accessibility in Web Design
January 1, 2008 by Jeff Adams
Accessibility is becoming more and more important on the web these days. In fact so important that new legislation makes it mandatory rather than optional.
I always check my site design on W3C Validator - its just common sense to get it checked out.
There are few tips on this subject, outlined below:-
- ALT Tags - Used when you add images. This is the text that displays to the user when the image is unavailable or if they are using a "screen reader".
- Flash - Love it or hate it, it is definitely a no-no if you want your page to be accessible. It is fine in small doses but even Macromedia's own Flash Video tends to put unwanted code in your pages.
- ID - If you are adding forms or any element where you can add an ID to identify it, then use it.
- Fonts - Try to avoid using fonts that aren't likely to be installed on your visitors computer. And if you can, don't hard code your font sizes - try to allow for the user to increase the font sizes where you can.
- No Tables - Any new web site that uses tables these days is living in the dark ages. They had their time but now we have CSS and DIV based layouts.
With CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) it lets us separate the design from content. This is particularly useful when designing for accessibility since you could offer alternate styling sheets that cater for increased font sizes.
Generally speaking, accessibility benefits everyone because not only is your site likely to be able to be viewed by everyone, it also encourages well-designed and coded pages.