Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, interact with and contribute to the web. The term 'disability' is pretty wide-ranging and covers visual disabilities, hearing impairments, physical disabilities, speech disabilities, cognitive and neurological disabilities, and age-related conditions.
So what can be done to make a website accessible? Personally I think that the answer is common sense: a well-thought-out website should automatically be accessible if it has been designed with the user in mind. For instance, a website with a good search facility will provide accessibility to a dyslexic user and to someone with cognitive disabilities. An online shopper with color blindness would benefit from a website with sufficient colour contrast and redundant information for colour. Using style sheets (CSS) also provides a colour-blind user with the option to control how colours appear on the screen.
The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) develops guidelines for accessibility of websites. You can read their 10 quick tips for making accessible sites on their website. Through the use of W3C compliant html and css coding, a website should inherently cater for users with disabilities. However, when writing content for a website it's still always worth thinking about who you are writing it for: after all, the world wide web has to cater for a pretty massive and diverse audience.
Test your website's accessibility with Wave Accessibility Tool.
3 comments:
Whilst I understand what you mean by common sense the process to create an accessible website is not always as simple as it may seem. Though it hasn't always happened previously, users are increasingly being placed at the center of the design process - this is what we need to see more of as it is easy to forget how users think and how disabilities or lack of knowledge determine how they use websites.
I maintain a blog at www.rosiesherry.com/blog which may be of interest to you.
Accessibility is not about disabilities, it's about providing access via any means; basically enabling a site to achieve the original vision of the web: any device, anywhere, anytime.
@Lea: That too is correct, but the more accepted definition of web accessibility now is the practice of keeping websites usable for all kinds of people, especially those who have disabilities. This is usually applied to website design. Toronto, my hometown, has its share of disabled individuals, so the designers here make sure that the websites they make are maintained for people of all sorts.
I would have to agree with the first comment. Disabilities are not limited to impairment of the senses. It can also refer to illnesses that hamper a person to do certain tasks. So making websites accessible is not easy at all. There are many considerations when it comes to web development. Toronto web developers respect that, and it's reflected in their work. That is an example that should be followed.
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