Web Accessibility
Been doing a lot of reading lately on website accessibility. It’s a fairly interesting topic. There are several sites offering hints and guidelines to develop an accessible site. I will link them in at the bottom of this post. It is fairly important, especially to large companies, to develop a site that is accessible to persons of all abilities. Failing to do so could open them to legal issues. See this article on ComputerWorld.com on a pending lawsuit against Target, for lack of accessibility on their website (Ironically, ComputerWorld.com is not accessible either)
When developing a site if a few SIMPLE guildines are followed. The main issue is to give users the alternate text to explain the content of non-textual elements such as buttons, form elements and images. The “Alt text” and Long Description Commands are built into to the HTML standards. The use of descriptions in these tags would greatly move most websites to being more accessible. Web developers need to keep in mind that some users of their sites use non-traditional methods of browsing their sites. Software packages such as screen readers, high contrast monitors, and others are used by persons with low vision. Other things to avoid are pop open windows, moving images and text, image maps, and other elements that require the use of a pointing device.
One Of the most important and difficult to implement considerations of web accessibility is, the use of High Contrast colors. It is discouraged to make users needing some of these accessibility features view a different page than the rest of the users of the site. Meaning that all users would need to view the high contrast site. While not ideal its is still possible to develop an attractive functional website that meets these standards.
Let me sum all this up with an apology, while researching this topic I have found a few aspects of my blog that lacks needed accessibility elements. I will work to repair these issues, unfortunately WordPress limits my control over some aspects of this page.
Some links to resources and discusions on Web Accessibility:
Are you using a WCAG 2.0 Accessibilty Supported technology to make your website, From Justin Throp.
HTML Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, From W3C.org
