Web Site Accessibility
August 7th, 2007So I attended a lunch presentation last week on web site accessibility and wanted to know your thoughts on the subject.
Do you think about accessibility when you are designing and coding?
Most principles about accessibility are fairly easy to remember for the every day coder - things like always using ALT tags for images, allowing users to skip repetitive content (i.e. menus, headers) on every page - things like that.
Here were a couple of items that I am going to take a closer look at as I go forward in my coding and I think you might find them helpful as well.
1) ensure links make sense in context and out of context - this means that as you read a sentence that contains a link, does that link make sense to where it is pointing to? The more difficult link is taking a link out of context - for example, if you have a clickable link that says ‘click here’ - that is not good. Other times coders use ‘read more’ or something similar. In context, click here probably makes sense, but out of context it does not.
2) caption or provide transcripts for media content - this one is a little more difficult but I found out that there are a number of free products that will help with this process. Probably the best benefit of transcripts for your media content is that they become searchable within your web site and also become available for search engines like Google to index as well.
While these are only two principles about web site accessibility, try some research and keep all your sites designed in a totally accessible format for all your users!
1 Comment(s)
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
Hi Mike,
It’s Gab, aka Bookworm SEO from EF (on your blogroll with Siteflip). Anyways, I thought I’d say you’ve got a good post here on accessibility. It’s a key issue and I’ve been doing a lot to make my new site accessible: check out SEOROI.com, and particularly how it looks minus images.
Hope you’re doing well, and that you keep up the good blogging!
Cheers,
Gab