HTML5 Foundations

chapter nine

Ensuring Accessibility

Joe wants to make sure that all the visitors to his new website can check out the menu, find special offers, and place a booking online. Sometimes, it is easy to forget that not all users can enjoy the same rich experience as we do when browsing a website. For users with visual or motor impairments, browsing the web can actually be quite a difficult task. We need to make sure that we build accessibility features into the Joe’s Pizza Co. website so that these users can easily read the content and navigate the pages.

Accessibility is affected by both your markup and your visual design. In this chapter, you focus on the markup side of this problem. You learn how to write markup that makes your websites more accessible to assistive technologies such as screen readers. It’s no good learning about the principles of accessibility if you have no way to test them, so this chapter also covers a variety of tools that you can use to test both your website markup and visual design.

Why Is Accessibility Important?

Building websites that are accessible is crucial to maintaining a web that anyone can use, regardless of whether he or she has a disability. This section addresses three major reasons why you should ensure that your websites are accessible.

Reason #1: It’s the Right Thing to Do

Making your websites accessible is simply the right thing to do. As a web developer, you should carefully consider your entire audience, not only the typical user, but the ...