Web Accessibility

What is web accessibility?

Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities [Wikipedia]

In this article I mention a number of methods to improve the general web accessibility of a website.

Legal reasons

As well as the moral obligations there are legal requirements to ensure your wesite is accessible.

Legislation such as the Disability Discrimination Act and the American equivalent state that services (online and offline) should be accessible anyone regardless of disabilities.

Search engine Optimisation

I've personally found (however i'm sure this is not always the case) that making a web site more accessible can automatically have the added advantage of improving its ranking in search engines.

Headings / Document structure

A web pages structure should be defined using heading elemets. Each page should have one and only 'h1' tag.

<h1>Heading 1</h1>
<h2>Heading 2</h2>
<h2>Heading 2</h2>

Ambiguous / duplicate links

Hyperlinks should make sense when taken out of their context. So links like 'Click here' or 'More info' should not be used.

This is because among other reasons some assistive technologies can list links on a page.

<p><a href="Products.aspx?c=bikes">Click here</a> for bikes</p>
<p><a href="Products.aspx?c=clothing">Click here</a> for clothing</p>

Image alt tags

All images should have alt tags.

<img src="squirrel.jpg" alt="A picture of a squirrel" />

Access keys

Keyboard shortcuts can be used to focus on important links for selecting.
Pressing Alt+[accesskey] will highlight the appropriate links and pressing enter will activate the link.

<p><a href="Default.aspx" accesskey="0">Home</a></p>

It is recommended to use a standard set of commonly used access keys.

Such as the UK Government Access Keys Standard For Websites

S – Skip navigation
1 – Home page
2 – What’s new
3 – Site map
4 – Search
5 – Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
6 – Help
7 – Complaints procedure
8 – Terms and conditions
9 – Feedback form
0 – Access key details

Other resources