Website accessibility is something that has been a slightly debated issue here on the forums.  A lot of people don't feel as if making their sites accessible to all viewers is a necessity.  If you read between the lines, what they are saying is that the cost of making their site accessible is not worth the added potential profit.  Fair enough.

However, a friend of mine recently showed me this article from the San Francisco Gate about how a blind student is suing Target for not making their site accessible to the blind.

Whether or not you think the lawsuit is frivolous, it does point out the basic need to do some basic accessibility checks.  Here are a few that I can think of:

- Use the ALT tag in your images, or use CSS to display your images (Site Reference forums does this.  If you look at the source of this page you will not find any images directly displayed (with the exception of smilies), but rather CSS replacing text)
- Do not rely on Javascript for navigation on your site.
- Allow your text to scale.  Legally blind people often set their font sizes to Large to make reading easier.
- Use friendly colors which focus on maintaining contrast without blinding those who can see fine.

I know for a fact that Site Reference has a long ways to go in terms of accessibility, but I can assure you that I will be working on it.

Any other accessibility notes that I left out?

I appreciate you raising this Sitereference. I've been giving this some thought lately.

My website is a photography site and although it has quite a bit of text, it is certainly graphic rich.

My youngest son, when in his late teens, got right into MSN chat. As a 17 year old drummer in a rock band he had no trouble getting dozens of girls to chat too. The girls all like a drummer!

He struck up a good friendship with a girl about three hours drive away and eventually went to spend a weekend with the family.

Although Mum is totally blind she does most of the things for the family that sighted mums do.

The family has, on the computer, a text to speach programme for Mum's benefit.

Dad has 20% vision. A short time before my son's visit, Dad, with the daughter on the front, went on a five day tandem bike ride for visually impared people, in the Otway Ranges.

So Dad got the bike out, and with my son on the back (because Dad knew the way around town) took my son for a ride.

When he got home, my son downloaded the text to speach speach programme and we had a play around with it.

As I understand it, hard and hartless robot though he is, Googlebot has a soft spot for the visually impared and so there is some SEO benifit in website assessability.

I'd welcome further comment on this, in particular, how I might best use alt text on thumbnail and image pages.

Regards,
Laurie.

Hi Laurie.
Regarding makeing your photoraphy site more accessible for those of us who are vision impaired.
I am thinking that you could use the long desc attribute, (by placeing a longer description of what the photo shows.
I have written an article on why you should use alt text, you can view it at: http://home.primus.com.au/kellykk/freew … tips5.html
I think the long description would be good for your site two though.
But baysicly, for alt text, you should describe what is in the image, which will then give those of us useing scene readers a chance of knowing what is contained in the image.
I hope that helps.
Regards Chad.

Chaddy,

I am currently going through a site overhaul with lots of help coming from travelagent and laurie. In one of his comments on my site, Laurie referenced this discussion about web accessibility. I've expanded on the alt tags as you suggested. Could I ask you to take a look at my site to see if this works? Just look for my name under Site Review and stuff about a doll hospital. (By the way, I've only revised the home page. Sub-pages are still on the to-do list.)

This is a revelation for me for two reasons. One, I try to be considerate of my fellow humanity, and second I am no fool! Our primary market is women over the age of 35 up to the oldest we've had yet - 96. Yes, some I've met are vision impaired, although none have ever mentioned web accessibility issues, but now that I've read this discussion, I'm sure someday I will hear about it from a customer.

Thanks for the heads up!

Cheers,

OldHack

OldHack wrote:

Chaddy,

I am currently going through a site overhaul with lots of help coming from travelagent and laurie. In one of his comments on my site, Laurie referenced this discussion about web accessibility. I've expanded on the alt tags as you suggested. Could I ask you to take a look at my site to see if this works? Just look for my name under Site Review and stuff about a doll hospital. (By the way, I've only revised the home page. Sub-pages are still on the to-do list.)

This is a revelation for me for two reasons. One, I try to be considerate of my fellow humanity, and second I am no fool! Our primary market is women over the age of 35 up to the oldest we've had yet - 96. Yes, some I've met are vision impaired, although none have ever mentioned web accessibility issues, but now that I've read this discussion, I'm sure someday I will hear about it from a customer.

Thanks for the heads up!

Cheers,

OldHack

Hi.
I just had a look at your site with IE6 and Jaws For Windows 5.0, my Screne reading program. Your site appears to be ok as far as accessibility goes. Note, I did not try it with increased font size so you may have some problems there. I would also suggest  that you run your pages through the W3C Validator, http://validator.w3.org and fix any errors. This will help witth accessibility and a range of other problems.
I think that everything else seams ok though.
Regards Chad. http://home.primus.com.au/kellykk/freewebdesignonline

Hey Chaddy,

Are you able to tell me of a free download text to speach programme? I deleated the one I had when the computer got too full of photos and music.

Regards,
Laurie.

Laurie wrote,

free download text to speach programme

Go to http://sourceforge.net/search/?words=sc … earch=soft, check the list and take your pick - if you've got Firefox there's even a plug-in emulator available.
Best source on the net for nearly everything - love Open Source!

laurie_m wrote:

Hey Chaddy,

Are you able to tell me of a free download text to speach programme? I deleated the one I had when the computer got too full of photos and music.

Regards,
Laurie.

Hi.
If you do a search for Jaws For windows, or Freadom Scientific you will and or should be able to download a free demo of the program.
I hope that helps.
--
Regards Chad.

Hi Chaddy,

You said:

Your site appears to be ok as far as accessibility goes

.

Thanks. Much appreciated. I'll keep an eye on this from now on. [No pun intended!]

OldHack

Hi Guys,

I can't help but feel that everyone is playing around the edges of Web Accessibility and even confusing Web Accessibility with Usability. I think that many are confused and wooly about the process and this appears to be universal across the Web.

The first step to making your web pages Accessible is to validate them to the W3C 4.01 Strict criteria and to do this you must start by using a Doctype Directive at the very top of your page and then specifing a character set using a META Tag in the HEAD of your page. 

Then you validate the page using the W3C validator:
http://validator.w3.org/

It is also necessary to validate your CSS at the same time:
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Then visit the SiteValet Website and test your page for Accessibility.
http://valet.webthing.com/

This is the process recommended on the W3C Website and I am afraid it will dishearten many of you at the beginning but if you are persistent then you will soon get the hang of it.

I went through the process on my Website and the rewards have been enormous in increased site traffic.

I have written an article on this subject which I have submitted to SiteReference. If they do not accept the article then I will post a link that points to the article.

The BBC reported recently that 90% of UK Government sites are not up to scratch. A scary proportion, that.

http://www.contentquality.com/ Is a nice tool which checks out 508, WCAG 1, 2 and 3

Does anyone here ever check their sites out with Silk Tide's Sitescore tool?

http://www.silktide.com/tools/sitescore/

A cool tool!

I was just reading about Silktide yesterday.  I've actually gone through and checked my score (not too good - somewhere in the 7's).  Its a nice tool that will definitely become more significant.

Another nice tip is to include the use off the accesskey attribute on your a href's as this will allow keyboard shortcuts to those who would maybe have dificulties in using a mouse, someone who's had a stroke for example.

Also, doing proper labels on text or images alongside form elements are nice as they allow the user to focus the form field easily.

Another neat resource on accessibility can be found over at Web Credible.

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/ there's stacks of web usability and accessibility stuff over there.
Silk Tide's score changes though depending on a few factors, you're best off creating a free account so you can run yours more often than a standard user.

I am new here at SiteReference. And I feel great to be here, while I see accessibility is a concern here too.

By the way I would like to add here two articles we have published on our web site:

http://www.webnauts.net/accessibility-need.html

http://www.webnauts.net/accessibility.html

I also have a huge link list about accessibility, but I do not know if I can post it here. I hope our admin will tell.