5 steps to a more accessible website
When building an accessible website are making an existing site accessibble, there are lots of aspects you need to consider but the following 5 steps should help you get started and should solve about 80% of your website’s accessibility problems.
Links that make sense
Read through all your link text without reading the content around them and ask yourself if they make sense. Rewrite anything that doesn’t.
Image alternatives
Every image on your website should have an alt tag. This alt tag should desribe the image in such a way that a user who cannot see the image doesn’t miss any information. In an ideal world all the images in your HTML code should have a semantic reason for being there. There are times though when this isn’t the case and it can be tempting in these situations to not use the alt tag though what happens when you do this is that users with screen-readers hear the URL of the image (its name and location) This can be particularly tedious and so even these eaningless images sould have an alt tag though it should be left empty.
Scaling
This is an issue that is loosing ground now that Internet Explorer has improved its website zoom functionality and some prominent developers have questioned the need for scalable text in modern websites. Personally I prefer to play it safe and ontinue to use relative font sizes (ems) in my site builds.
Stand out
Give your page some contrast but keep it easy on the eyes. The ideal for sites with text content is a dark grey text over a white background. Absolute black text can be a little dazzling whilst white text on a dark background or any other combination of bright colours can e quite hard on the eyes.
No scripts on me
Make sure your site is iewable not only in different rowsers and on different platforms but also with images, styles, Flash and/or javascript turned off. This will not only improve your accessibiity but will also improve your search engine traffic.