Making Your Site Accessible

Millions of internet users have a physical condition that limits their ability to see text and graphics, hear sounds or use a mouse. Millions more surf the web with graphics turned off, JavaScript disabled, or use a portable device to access web sites. By making your web site accessible you can turn otherwise frustrated users into loyal clients and customers.

In order to ensure that everyone has equal access to the volumes of information available on the web, the United States Congress passed Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, effective in June of 2001. Although it is a requirement only for new or revised government web sites, it’s a good idea for all web sites to accommodate as many visitors as possible. After all, the estimated 54 million disabled in the U.S. alone makes up a considerable group of potential web users. If your site is accessible, that means that someone using a braille reader, text-to-speach translator, Palm handheld, portable phone, or in-car computer will be able to understand your message, even if it’s in a different form than we see on a typical computer browser.

Making Text and Graphics Accessible

How can this be accomplished? Most of the requirements can be met through the diligent application of a few simple guidelines. First of all, text on a page must be actual text in the code, not just words contained in a graphic.

If there are words in graphic form, which is fairly common in navigation buttons, an alt tag must accompany each graphic. An alt tag is part of the code that describes a graphic. For instance, a red button with the word “HOME” on it would have an alt tag that says, “Home button.” This makes that button “visible” to the blind when the tag is read aloud to them.

As an aside, some web designers put their headlines into a graphic in order to have more control over the appearance than they would have if they depended on the user’s browser to determine the look. So, they may have a beautiful headline in a script font, but the search engines that spider their page won’t be able to read the words in the graphic. Since headlines are generally given more weight in the search engine rankings than regular text, these sites are being penalized in the rankings. Putting in an alt tag for these graphic headlines would help alleviate this problem.

A photo on a page should have an alt tag that describes the picture in a way that is meaningful to someone who can’t see it. By the way, alt tags aren’t visible onscreen, except briefly before the graphic loads. If someone is surfing with graphics turned off (which some people do to speed things up), they will see the alt tags and can then decide if they want to download individual graphics.

The Use of Color for Meaning

Another requirement deals with the use of color. There should be a strong contrast between the background and the text color, for instance. We’ve all seen those wonderful sites that think it looks great to have green text on a black background. If you think it’s hard to decipher, consider how impossible it would be to read if you were a low-vision or color-blind user.

Also, you must ensure that any content presented through color is available without color. For example, a horizontal bar is often used to separtate different content areas on a page and is logical to a sighted user, but to the blind or someone using a non-graphical browser it may have no meaning. Different sections of a page should be identified using HTML heading elements (H1-H6). These headlines may be supplemented by a horizontal bar, but should not be replaced by one.

Problems Using JavaScript

A third consideration is the use of JavaScript to create drop-down menus. While this is a very useful technique to compact a lartge site into a small number of navigation buttons, it won’t work for the blind or for anyone who has disabled JavaScript in their browsers. JavaScript is also used to bring up those pop-up windows that are often used for ads, so as of July 2002 12% of web surfers have JavaScript disabled. So if you have a drop-down menu on your site you should also have text links at the bottom of your page so that those 12% can access the rest of your site.

This article has touched on a few of the main topics that should be important to you as you present your site to the world. The next section has a couple of resources that can give you even more information.

Additional Resources

So how can you determine if your site meets the accessibility requirements of Section 508? Fortunately, there’s a simple way to do that, and learn a lot at the same time. If you visit The Bobby Site, you can input the URL (web address) of your site and within a few seconds it will evaluate your page and make recommendations on how to fix items that are not in compliance. You should make sure that all the Priority 1 requirements are met.

In addition, the World Wide Web Consortium, which develops standards for the web, has a very complete review of Web Content Accessibility Guidlines. Here’s a quote from their abstract:

“These guidelines explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities. The guidelines are intended for all Web content developers (page authors and site designers) and for developers of authoring tools. The primary goal of these guidelines is to promote accessibility. However, following them will also make Web content more available to all users, whatever user agent they are using (e.g., desktop browser, voice browser, mobile phone, automobile-based personal computer, etc.) or constraints they may be operating under (e.g., noisy surroundings, under- or over-illuminated rooms, in a hands-free environment, etc.). Following these guidelines will also help people find information on the Web more quickly. These guidelines do not discourage content developers from using images, video, etc., but rather explain how to make multimedia content more accessible to a wide audience.”

By being aware of the problems faced by disabled visitors to your site and by making a few simple changes, you can be sure that all your content is available to everyone, regardless of their personal needs or the user agent they employ to surf the web.