Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual

Accessibility

Even the clearest, most well-planned Web sites can pose a real challenge to people with vision problems. To make Web sites more accessible to them, the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)—a part of the World Wide Web Consortium—has proposed guidelines for the design of Web sites. In fact, the U.S. government has mandated its own set of guidelines (Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act) for all Web sites built by and for the government. (And even if you’re not working for the government, following these guidelines will improve your site by making it accessible to a larger audience.)

Dreamweaver MX provides several newly enhanced tools for meeting these guidelines and helping Web designers build more accessible sites (page 114). But for comprehensive analysis of your site, use the Accessibility site report. With it, you can evaluate your Web pages to make sure they comply with W3C guidelines and the requirements of Section 508.

Checking your site against accessibility standards is similar to running any other report. Follow steps 1–4 on page 468, taking care to turn on the Accessibility checkbox.

Once the report is complete—which may take awhile for an entire site—the process of identifying and fixing the errors is a little different than with other reports.

1. Select an error in the Results panel (see Figure 15-3).

   Accessibility errors come with one of two designations: Failed and Manual. A failure (marked by a red X in the Results panel) indicates that some item on ...