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Top 5 Quick Accessibility Fixes
By Lorna Gibson, published 26th January 2004.
Sometimes the most difficult thing with accessibility is making a start - knowing what to do first. This article suggests some quick things to look at that will get you on the road to ensuring your web resource is as accessible as possible. All of these things can be easily done today and will make a significant impact to the site.
- 1. Check for alternative and equivalent textual descriptions for images
- Ensuring that images have alternative text is fundamentally important. What is even more important is to ensure that the alternative text is meaningful. It is not appropriate to have alternative text "98900.jpg" or "image"; but it's also possible to be too descriptive, prolonging the browsing experience unnecessarily. The alternative (alt) text should describe what message the image is conveying - not necessarily the same as describing the image. If the image is decorative, for example there simply as a blue bar to separate the logo from the content then it is appropriate to set the alt text to null (alt=""). This is preferable to leaving it blank as it indicates to a blind person for example, that "this image is just for visual formatting" rather than "I didn't take your needs into account".
- Using a text-only browser like Lynx to look at your pages can help you determine whether alternative text is missing, or whether it confuses rather than helps understanding.
- 2. Check for meaningful link text
- Ensuring that hyperlink text conveys what is on the destination page is important - that way people know what to expect from the page. Meaningful link text also improves the navigation significantly for screen reader users who use the keyboard to 'tab' through the links to quickly access the information they require. Links with text 'click here' or 'more' are not very meaningful and not very useful to a blind person who 'tabs' through the links and all they hear is 'click here' 'click here' 'click here'.
- 3. Appropriately named titles
- Ensuring that pages have appropriate titles is also important. It gives people an indication of where they are in the site, and is particularly useful for screen reader users as a first indication of whether the page they've arrived at is the page they want to be at. Thus, it's important to appropriately title pages so that the title reflects what is provided on the page. Informative page titles also helps easy linking to your page by search engines.
- 4. Ensure that contact information is provided
- It is important to provide information about who to contact should someone be unable to access certain information on the web site. This means that if despite your best efforts, a person is still unable to access some information or functionality, then they can contact someone who can provide them with help.
- 5. Provide an accessibility statement
- By providing an accessibility statement on your site (ideally linked from every page of the site) it ensures that you're demonstrating to your site visitors your awareness to the issues of accessibility. Your accessibility statement would typically contain a 'state of play' of your web site (what you've done in terms of accessible design, where there are known accessibility problems), your intentions to improve them and someone to contact should someone want to let you know of a significant problem they encounter (this could be the same person as in 4).