The Big Oxford Computer Co. Ltd

How to create and maintain an accessible website

by Richard Ward - Multimedia Designer

What is web accessibility?

Web accessibility enables users with disabilities to use the web. A website which has not been created with accessibility in mind will either be only partially available to those with disabilities or not available at all.

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) works with organisations around the world to develop strategies, guidelines, and resources to help make the Web accessible to people with disabilities.

(WCAG) developed by the WAI are guidelines widely regarded as the international standard for Web accessibility. They are also referred to as best practice guidelines. WCAG Version 2.0 was adopted in December 2008 and is now the current adopted standard.
How should I start ensuring my website complies?

If you have an existing website, compliance shouldn't be seen as an instant result. It should be something that you start working towards, ensuring that best practices start to be adopted. It would be a shame if you got your website in a good accessible state only for it be undone by incorrect practices! If however, you are building a website from scratch you should be able to ensure that the site is built correctly from the ground up.

Do review the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines on achieving compliance.

If your website is maintained using a CMS, it maybe that the templates can be easily tweaked to ensure that the majority of accessibility issues are resolved. Other issues may need to be addressed directly by your CMS supplier as it may involve changes to the core code.

Ensuring that your website is compliant is a huge job, but there are some simple things to check which will greatly improve the accessibility of your site:

Images – these should always have alt attributes. This attribute describes the image to those who are visually compared, as well as search engines so it's important to consider what actually goes into this attribute. The value should describe in a clear but concise way what is being shown.
Links – are they labelled correctly? Basically the link text should be representative of where the user will be sent and make sense out of context. A screen reader may well read the links as a single list, out of context, so avoid "click here" at all costs! If you need a longer description, you should use the title attribute.
Use of media – In general, websites are making much more use of media, for example Audio and Video. Any media that requires a plugin, could mean that some users will not be able to see the media as you intended. It's therefore important that an alternative is provided. For audio, this should be in the form of a transcript and for video, captions should be utilised.
Javascript – This provides the mechanism for many interactive websites but what happens if it is turned off. If you rely on Javascript for navigation and it's turned off how would a user navigate your site. The best advice is not to rely on Javascript to access content.
Size of text – Your site will have been designed to display text at a particular size but does your design allow the text size to be increased (which major browsers allow you to do)? Any design should be scaleable to allow this to happen.

References

Some useful resources (all links are to external websites and open in a new window):

Online

Web Accessibility Initiative(WAI)

W3C Markup Validation Service

Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools

Web Accessibility Tools, Checklist and Guidelines

WebAim (Web Accessibility in Mind)

Publications

Nielsen, Jakob and Loranger, Hoa: Prioritizing Web Usability; New Riders 1 edition (2006)

Krug, Steve: Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability; New Riders 2 edition (2005)

Chisholm, Wendy and May, Matt: Universal Design for Web Applications: Web Applications That Reach Everyone; O'Reilly Media, Inc. 1 edition (2008)

Harper, Simon and Yesilada, Yeliz: Web Accessibility: A Foundation for Research (Human-computer Interaction Series); Springer (2008)

Craven, Jenny: Web Accessibility: Practical Advice for the Library and Information Professional; Facet Publishing (2008)

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