Accessibility fundamentals

Overview
Website accessibility has become a major issue for web designers and developers. Websites designed without taking accessibility into consideration exclude certain sectors of the population and limit your customer base. This course will enable you to ensure your site conforms to the WAI (W3C) Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Prerequisites
Working knowledge of HTML and or a development platform e.g. Dreamweaver.

Course Content General concepts and techniques

• Why make your site accessible?
• Analysis: what makes a site inaccessible?
• Up to date standards and technologies
• Browser and platform compatibility

Legal issues

• Case studies
• Legal requirements

Coding for accessibility

• Developer tools
• Doctypes: XHTML v HTML
• Deprecated elements
• Writing efficient and meaningful HTML

Building pages with CSS

• Separating content from presentation
• The cascade, inheritance, specifity
• Fonts, colours and other properties
• Non-tabled page layouts
• Using lists for navigation
• Columns and other layout techniques
• Styles for print

Navigation

• Clear navigation structures
• Link titles - identifying link content
• Specifying keyboard shortcuts for links
• Using the tab key for navigation
• Adding a 'Skip Navigation' option
• Building a Site Map

Validation

• WAI guidelines
• UK Government guidelines
• Bobby, Web Exact and other resources
• Manual checks - Accessibility checklist

Assistive technologies

• Screen readers
• Braille displays

Text

• Specifying language and encoding
• Scalability - ensuring readable text
• Acronyms and abbreviations

Images

• Alt tags - providing alternative content
• Using background images - text replacement
• Animated gifs

Tables

• Using headers and titles for data tables
• When to avoid tables

Forms

• Associating labels with form elements
• Building in keyboard access for forms

Accessible design

• Building for usability
• Fluid vs fixed design - allowing for scalability
• Colour schemes - contrasting colours
• Using alternatives to colour for mark-up

Multimedia & scripting

• Working with Flash, video or audio content - providing alternatives
• Issues with JavaScript and other browser scripting languages
• Mouse events - providing keyboard based alternatives