Summary Guidelines
2 likes778 views
The document provides guidelines for making web content accessible to users with disabilities. It recommends providing equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content, not relying on color alone, using markup and style sheets properly, clarifying natural language usage, creating tables that transform gracefully, ensuring new technologies transform gracefully, allowing user control of time-sensitive content, ensuring direct accessibility of embedded interfaces, designing for device independence, using interim solutions, following W3C technologies and guidelines, providing context and orientation information, clear navigation mechanisms, and ensuring documents are clear and simple.
Summary Guidelines
- 2. Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content Although some people cannot use images, movies, sounds, applets, etc. directly, they may still be able to use pages that include equivalent information to the visual or auditory content. The equivalent information must serve the same purpose as the visual or auditory content.
- 3. Don’t rely on colour alone If colour alone is used to convey information, people who cannot differentiate between certain colours will not receive the information. For example, links should not be indicated by changing colour alone, as users may not identify them. When foreground and background colors are too similar, they may not provide sufficient contrast when viewed by people with different types of color deficits.
- 4. Use markup and style sheets and do so properly You may be tempted to use (or misuse) code to achieve a desired formatting effect. Be aware that these practices cause accessibility problems and you must consider whether the formatting effect is so critical as to warrant making the document inaccessible to some users. Using markup improperly – not according to specification – hinders accessibility.
- 5. Clarify natural language usage When content developers mark up language changes in a document, speech synthesisers and Braille devices can automatically switch to the new language, making the document more accessible to multilingual users. In addition to helping assistive technologies, natural language markup allows search engines to find key words and identify documents in a desired language.
- 6. Create tables that transform gracefully Some browsers allow users to navigate among table cells and access header and other table cell information to give them a better understanding of the table’s content by describing each cell in turn. Unless marked-up properly, the tables will not provide users with the appropriate information. Tables should be used to mark up truly tabular information ("data tables"). You must avoid using them to lay out pages ("layout tables").
- 7. Ensure that pages featuring new technology transform gracefully Users often prefer to use their own style sheet to specify their own text size, colours, fonts, etc. Pages that transform gracefully remain accessible despite any of the constraints including physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities, work constraints, and technological barriers. It’s a myth that disabled users do not use new technologies such as AJAX, Flash or streaming audio/video.
- 8. Ensure user control of time-sensitive content changes Some people with cognitive or visual disabilities are unable to read moving text quickly enough or at all. Movement can also cause such a distraction that the rest of the page becomes unreadable for people with cognitive disabilities (dyslexia). Screen readers are unable to read moving text. People with physical disabilities might not be able to move quickly or accurately enough to interact with moving objects. Applies to AJAX, Flash, DHTML and animated gifs.
- 9. Ensure direct accessibility of embedded user interfaces When an embedded object has its "own interface", the interface – like the interface to the browser itself – must be accessible. If the interface of the embedded object cannot be made accessible, an alternative accessible solution must be provided. Again, this applies to AJAX, Flash and DHTML. It is a myth that these technologies aren’t used by disabled users, so you must make them accessible.
- 10. Design for device independence Ensure that any page can be operated in a device-independent manner. For example, for scripts, specify logical event handlers rather than device-dependant event handlers (onMouseup requires the user to be using a mouse). Generally, pages that allow keyboard interaction are also accessible by users with assistive devices.
- 11. Use interim solutions For example, older screen readers read lists of consecutive links as one link – for now separate those links. Also, changing the current window or popping up new windows can be very disorienting to users who cannot see that this has happened. If a link opens in a new window, or changes the current window the user should be forewarned.
- 12. Use W3C technologies and guidelines These guidelines are version 1.0 of the W3C Web Content Authoring Guidelines. XMTHL and CSS are W3C technologies and user agents like IE, Firefox or JAWS are developed according to the W3C User Agent Accessibility Guidelines. It all fits together. By using these guidelines we (as part of the wider Internet community) can make the Internet more accessible to users with disabilities.
- 13. Provide context and orientation information Complex relationships between parts of a page may be difficult for people with cognitive disabilities and people with visual disabilities to interpret. Providing information about the relationships between parts of a page can be useful for all users.
- 14. Provide clear navigation mechanisms Clear and consistent navigation mechanisms are important to people with cognitive disabilities or with visual disabilities and benefit all users. Orientation information, navigation bars, a site map, etc. will increase the likelihood that a person can find what they are looking for on a site.
- 15. Ensure that documents are clear and simple Consistent page layout, recognizable graphics, and easy to understand language benefit all users. In particular, they help people with cognitive disabilities or those who have difficulty reading. Using clear and simple language promotes effective communication and also benefits people whose first language differs from your own, including those people who communicate primarily in sign language.