Web Site Accessibility

November 2003

Accessibility

The objective of the accessibility project is to make this site available to people who are blind or visually impaired. There are many benefits for making a web site accessible which are well documented in the article Auxiliary Benefits of Accessible Web Design by the WAI however I feel that any web designer has a social responsibility to develop a web site that is accessible to all users.

Main points

There are plenty of resources at the WAI web site including a checklist of items for accessible web content. I have listed the main points below.

• No text based images. An image that is used as a banner or a button is allowed by accessibilty standards so long as that image tag has an alt attribute. However as a best practice you are better using plain text as this works better in browser reader software and has an additional benefit of making your web site much easier to localise.
• No frames. There are many reasons for not using frames including begin difficult to navigate with
• No popups. A very common and very annoying feature of many web sites is new windows being continuously popped up. Popups are even worse for someone using assistive software for reading a web page as it is often difficult to get lost when trying to navigate back to the original from a popup window.

  Pop up windows are still useful and did you know that you can force a link to popup in most browsers. In Opera and Internet Explorer hold the shift key while clicking on a link, in Mozilla you can do the same with the control key. You can also right click and select appropriate menu item.

• No scripting. For security reasons many people disable scripting in there browser. This web site has chosen not use any scripting unless absolutely essential. Scripting does server a purpose and for accessibility the script must ensure that all functionality is available via keyboard and that any information is available to assistive technologies.
• No hard coded font sizes. The majority of browsers allow a user to resize the text on the page which is of course a great benefit for visually impaired users. However this won't work if the page designer has hard coded a font size.
• All links have well defined title, all images have a well defined alt attribute and of the visual diagrams in the JSP course all have longdesc attributes.
• The web site is useable without applying the style sheets. The navigation bar can be skipped through use of the "Top" link in the main navigation bar.
• Access keys have been defined for the navigation bar links as follows,
  • Top - T
  • Home - H
  • Courses - C
  • Software - S
  • Home Pages - P
  • Links - L

The site has been tested for accessibility using Bobby (link) and I would love to hear using the contact link below from anyone who is visually impaired or is using this site who is using web page readers.

I am grateful to the following sites for advice on making the site accessible

• RNIB The Royal National Institute of the Blind
• IBM IBM web Accessibility Page
• hisoftware HiSoftware Publishing's Understanding Accessibility Document
• w3c The W3C's Web Accessibility Project