Is your website easily accessible?

A few years ago, the website owners were concerned to get the advantage of having a site that catches the eye by highly illustrated design or by the use of Flash animation.

Nowadays, they are concerned with the advantage of referencing in the question of search engines.

Soon they will also be sensitive to issues of accessibility. Why? What good do a site can be accessed by people with visual disabilities?

It is easy! The robots of different search engines are blind visitors. They do not see your color or your pictures or your animations. They are there on your site for information. Do they have access to your information? That’s what we will see!

 

First, define “accessibility”. The Wikipedia definition of accessibility is:

 

Putting the Web and its services available to all individuals, whatever their hardware or software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location or their physical or mental constitute is.

 

Now, how quickly determine whether the site is accessible or not? There are a multitude of tools to analyze a site. You will find the website accessibility from W3C site. Please read the details from there to understand the subject, what you are going to do.

The validator allows you to quickly validate a number of good accessibility practices automatically by presenting the results of 3 priority levels defined by the WCAG ( Web Content Accessibility Guidelines ).

 

Priority levels

 

Priority 1

 

A Web content developer must Satisfy this checkpoint. OTHERWISE, one or more groups find it impossible to Will access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint Is A Basic Requirement For Some groups to Be Able to use Web documents.

 

Priority 2

 

A Web content developer should Satisfy this checkpoint. OTHERWISE, one or more groups Will Find it Difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint Will remove Significant Barriers to Accessing web documents.

 

Priority 3

 

A Web content developer May address this checkpoint. OTHERWISE, one or more groups Somewhat Will Find it Difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint Will Improve access to Web documents.

 

Auto commit is interesting but it is not sufficient. Here is a top 10 in the disorder of best practices for Web accessibility:

• Make sure that all non-text elements have alternative text. If your description is long, write it in the attribute LONGDESC and summarized in the ALT attribute.
• Avoid links such as “Click here”. The text on the link should always be representative of the target toward which it points. Moreover, if presented with a menu of images or any other link on an image, use the TITLE attribute in your element A to indicate a textual value of the target even if the image contains a text alternative . If you link to a page in another language, use the attribute hreflang.
• Specify your font sizes in different ways. Avoid the PX and the PT, use EM or%. It is a bad habit of some WordPress theme creators to put these px, pt etc. Do not think you paid $35 and will get an CSS wise error free theme. Check it.
• Try to navigate your site using only the keyboard. You should have access to all content.
• Avoid using iframes. At the same time, you can be sure that no search results will point to a page that does not have your header and / or navigation.
• If your site uses tables for the presentation of content, make sure they use the summary attribute to allow blind visitors to gain an overall picture.
• Use the element with the attribute LABEL FOR designing your forms. This will allow a blind visitor to more easily associate the title of the box with the box itself. The LABEL element can also click on the text to activate a check box rather than having to click directly on the box.
• Test your site with multiple browsers, versions and operating systems. Try also with a specialized browser for blind person: MozBraille or JAWS .
• Write use cases and ask a stranger on the street using your site to find some information. Give him a little reward.
• Always try to use the correct element to represent information. If this is not information “tabular”, do not use table. Put your title in the H1 to H6 elements. Your paragraphs in the P element You menus in a UL LI list. Then use CSS to define the presentation of all these elements.

 

In these way, Internet in future is going to be a complex science, that needs depth of understanding of some human disease condition, their psychology etc.

The global burden of aged, fragile person are increasing. In fact, today in many countries, people aged >70 years out numbers the youth population. The responsibility to take care of their well being is not only the duty of a social activist, family members, health care professionals; but also of you: as a webmaster.

Many people today uses below the header navigation text Advertisements to fool  users to make a click and make money. Yes, definitely we need money to run a website; but keep in mind, Google is thinking of these points too. We will go into depth in this topic in future.

It is not a humane act to put a flickering banner to attract visitors. Keep in mind, these flickering banner can precipitate attacks of seizure in some epileptic patients, can cause severe headache in patients with migraine.

 

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