Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Web Accessibility Techniques

Official guidelines and checkpoints are vital, but they don’t give us much in the way of best practice advice or implementation techniques. To help you, the W3C provides reference documents with overviews of HTML, CSS, and core techniques at http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php.

Here are some good starting points that will help you make your web sites more accessible.

Start with meaning.

In other words, use HTML elements for the purposes for which they were designed: to provide a semantic description of a document’s content. As discussed in the guidelines earlier in this chapter, make use of headings (h1 through h6), lists, quotes, and blockquotes to provide structure to your pages. Use table markup appropriately as shown in Chapter 13. Screen readers and other software infer meaning and provide functionality based on this markup.

Provide alternatives.

Ensure that you provide some type of alternative--alt text, longdesc, transcripts for audio files, and captions for video—for users with various disabilities. Formerly cost prohibitive, captioning and transcripting can now be outsourced at a very reasonable cost and provide significant benefit to users that require alternative media types.

Use Zoom layouts.

Typically used by low-vision users, a Zoom layout is an alternative view of the same content. Users of screen magnification software have a limited view of what is on the screen, making multiple columns difficult to follow. A single-column format can be very ...