Disability Access

More about accessibility

You are trying to provide a reasonable level of accessibility for all people - blind, partially sighted or colour blind, deaf or tone deaf, limited motability or arthritic, physically or mentally handicapped. You also have to stay competitive with those that have fashionable designs and let their visitors experience the full range of multimedia that browers and add-ins make possible. For a new website, spending a little time understanding accessibility issues means there is little or no cost incorporating good practices right from the beginning.

But unless you are specialising in disability access, if it would take a large part of your efforts and budget to convert your existing website just to provide accessibility, you would probably be spending too much. You have a business to run, and are expected to make reasonable adjustments, but not to go bust in the process!

Style sheets (CSS) are a great way of being able to control the overall look and feel of a site - and change it quickly. They're also the best friend of those with accessibility problems, as users can set up their browsers to use their own style sheets, with whatever font and font size they feel most comfortable with for instance. But you can destroy this ability by using inline styles, where they are set in the actual page. If you are doing this now, then start moving them into a separate css text file (or files) and linking it in the page header.

HTML should be done according to W3C, not according to Microsoft or Netscape. Valid HTML is essential for accessibility, and good spelling is important. For instance text to speech converters have to parse your web pages to do their job. Most sites are generated using tools such as Dreamweaver and Front Page - these produce better script than before, but still the real emphasis on accessibility should be firmly on pressuring browser makers and tool makers to follow the W3C standards. They should be the first target for enforcement.

Large corporations often provide the worst levels of accessibility. Slow to take to the Internet, they often threw together web enablement projects with unskilled resources, and employed outside design houses without the knowledge to specify and supervise that work. They should be second in line for any legislation enforcement. With the poor quality of accessibility on many other websites, do your best and you hopefully won't be third!