Question

can anyone give me some tips or hook me up with some good links on this?

i’m having trouble finding much more than ‘add alt text to the images’ and i’m not sure how current the info is…

i get the whole semantic markup thing but could probably do with a bit more guidance on that too.

also not sure how things would work across different browsers.

Answer 1

1) Use HTML’s heading tags for each and every section of content on your pages. The heading tags are: h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6

2) Ensure the prior mentioned heading tags exist with the proper heirarchal sequence. For instance h1 tags are important than h2 tags. Screen readers use these heading tags to navigate the content of the page. If they not present or improperly ordered a visually impared user cannot navigate the page’s content.

3) Don’t use JavaScript to dynamically change the content on the screen without first prompting the user that text will change. If JavaScript changes text on the screen before a screen reader can read the content there is no way a visually impared user can know that content was changed.

4) Don’t serve the user a 1000 images. If an image does not convey relevant content then make it a CSS background image.

5) Be gracious with the title attribute, especially on anchor tags. This can tell the user where they are about to go.

6) Don’t put text on an image that cannot be conveyed as alternate content. The visually impared do not read images.

7) Ensure all your meta data is relevant. If you change any of your content be sure not to forget the extra bits of descriptive data.

8) AJAX defeats accessibility. Be kind with your use of AJAX.

9) The visually impared, and actually almost all visual users, do not care how pretty your pages are. They are there to get information, shop, or what ever other specific purpose. Make your data easy to understand and quick to retrieve. If a user cannot get in, get what they wanted, and then get out in record time they won’t ever come back.

10) Do not use any presentation tags or presentation attributes in your HTML. Use a stylesheet. If your HTML contains presentation conventions they are probably not accessibile.

11) If your content exists in a different order visually than how it is written in the HTML, from top to bottom, it likely fails accessibility. Keep things orderly and consistent. Users expect content to flow from top to bottom and for tab indexing to follow the flow of content.

12) Do usability testing with screen reader software. It is not possible to know how accessible a page is by looking at.