Making web sites sites accessible
In the UK it is now a legal requirement to make web sites accessible to people with disabilities, particularly those with visual visual impairment and those who are blind.
A useful starting point and reference for this aspect of web design would be the W3C page on “Evaluating web sites for Accessibility“.
Some very basic techniques for ensuring that web pages meet with the accessibility standards would include:
- Ensuring that images have alt statements
- Fonts should have a relative rather than absolute size measure. This allows them to be increased in size on the screen using the browsers increase text size capabilities.
- When expressing the size of fonts in style sheets do not use pixels (an absolute measure). The measure that I use is “ems” which is fully scalable. Find out more about ems. Definition of ems
- Ensure that there is sufficient contrast between text and its background. Find out more about colour contrast.
- You can check your web pages using this accessibility checker.
Another aspect of accessibility is the way that the web page functions for people who are unable to use a mouse. It should be possible to use the tab key to reach and operate the links and form controls on a page. The links should incidate what they lead to, either by having explanatory text or alt statements.