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Making a Web site accessible means making a Web site that can be used by somone with a disability. The W3C has developed a collection of documents to help with understanding accessibility and how to create accessible documents. There are four documents associated with accessibility and provide guidelines in creating a accessible Web site.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
CSS Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
HTML Techniques for Web Conte3nt Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
Accessibility represents an important step towards independence for users with disabilities, as it can provide quick, easy, low-cost access to services and information. Providing this added means of communication could broaden the scope of employment, entertainment and education opportunities, in addition to offering the chance to take part in day-to-day activities that many of us take for granted – such as banking and grocery shopping.
Just as in the physical world, where accessibility aids assist a variety of people with and without disabilities, it is all users that can benefit from an accessible website. Web pages that are created with a disabled audience in mind will be pleasing to the eye, fast loading, easy to maintain, present information in a direct and simple way, navigate with consistency, and will function across a range of browsers and rendering devices.
With continual improvements in the usability of websites – understanding the way people use sites, identifying key tasks and information, finding support information – website operators are finding a reduction in support costs and the amount of customers that are abandoning shopping baskets before the checkout. Accessibility builds on this, firstly by helping to bring more customers to a site, and secondly by creating an environment that offers a simple, intuitive method for purchasing goods and services. To test accessibility in Dreamweaver, you choose File > Check Page > Accessibility. Dreamweaver analyzes the page you have open and provides you with a list of errors. The results panel provides reports on the Web pages in your site, including the Check Accessibility report.
If you right-click one of the entries and choose More Info, you can access the UsableNet Accessibility Reference Guide to get more information and help you make sense of the accessibility errors in the Results panel, and its all built into the Dreamweaver software.
In Review
In your own words define web accessibility.
Web accessibility is the design of a Web page that is accessible to persons with a disability.
What is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)?
The ADA is a law that states that no one with a disability can be discriminated against by the government or a private company.
How does the ADA apply to web design?
The Department of Justice formally stated that the ADA also applies to the World Wide Web. Websites need to make certain accommodations to provide easy access to everyone.
What does it mean to simplify the content of your site?
You keep the content of your website simple by presenting content in a straightforward and logical order.
How many clicks should it take to get from any page to any other page in your site?
It should only take three clicks to get from any page to any other page in your site.
Name two things you can do to make your site more accessible to the visually impaired.
Two things you can do to make your site accessible to the visually impaired are include ALT tags with every image and include a hyperlink with the image.
Name something you can incorporate into your design that can make your site accessible to people with low vision, as well as people with color blindness.
A good solution to help people with low vision and color blindness is to use style sheets when designing pages.
If you have audio content on your site, what can you do to make sure people with hearing disabilities can also appreciate it?
To make sure that people with hearing disabilites can appreciate your site you can use MAGpie, a software package that allows you to easily create captions for streaming media in Windows Media Player.
What can you do to make your site more user-friendly for those who have a hard time using a mouse?
To make your site user-friendly for those who have a hard time using a mouse you could use a special HTML attribute called ACCESSKEY. Or LUCY , a hands free keyboard that is atached to a pair of lensless glasses.
What three things can you do to make your site easier for a person with cognitive disabilities to use?
Three things you can do to make your site easier for a person with congnitive disabilities to use are keeping your navigation and menu structure simple, use graphics as a visual anchor for long strings of text, and making sure that whenever you use moving graphics or music on a site, you allow the user the option to turn it off.
The following is a print screen that shows a the accessibility of a form in Dreamweaver.
