Phil Zoio's Weblog, January 28, 2005

On Accessible Web Sites

I recently went to a seminar on accessible web site design, delivered by A Recipe For Success. Accessibility is something which most people do not think about unless they know someone who is disabled. I count myself in this category. It was an interesting and eye-opening lecture. In spite of the millions that some companies spend on their web sites, many clearly haven't given any thought to how disabled people will use their sites. Something that very few people know is that under current UK disability discrimination legislation, it is illegal to have a web site which has not made a reasonable attempt to be accessible.

The main types of disabilities which will affect your ability to use a web site are:

• visual impairment or blindness
• motor co-ordination impairments which restrict you to using only the keyboard, for example

The clear message which came out of the seminar is that it is actually very simple to make a site accessible if you plan it that way to beginning it. Retrofitting accessibility can be more accessible. Here are the most obvious tips for making your site accessible:

• use the alt attribute in your HTML image markup. This makes the image content more meaningful to screen reader (a piece of software which reads and interprets your page and talks it back to you)
• use the tabIndex attribute in your HTML markup to set tab ordering. This allows a user restricted to a keyboard to move through the page contents in a more meaningful way
• don't hard code the size of your text. Instead, use % to define the text size relative to the currently selected default. If you use pixels to define text size, IE will hold you to this, even if you attempt to change the text size using the View -> Text Size menu

Guidelines for web site accessibility have been defined by the W3C. The Bobby organisation provides a page to check whether your site conforms to accessibility guidelines.

I aim to spend a little time making my web site accessible over the next few weeks. The site's quite niche, so I don't expect that many disabled readers, but just to prove to myself how easily it can be done.