Accessibility Tips
Posted on Monday March 13th, 2006
Web development can be a rapid process with all sorts of distractions and obstacles. It's easy to hack a page together, step back and say to yourself "OK this looks good; we're finished." But what is that really saying? The world wide web is not just an art exhibit, it is a communication medium. A designer must be concerned with the information before the eye-candy.
As the web becomes more prevalent in the general population's lives, not only will it be good practice, but it will be necessary. Already many countries require accessibility to be considered when designing a government-affiliated site, just as they require buildings to be handicap-accessable.
Start with the Basics
You probably know what I'm going to say. Get that page cleaned up with semantic markup! Not only does this ease the job of any viewing device and add value and meaning to your content, but it takes you 80% of the way. I'll stop there since we've discussed this before multiple times.
Not only the Blind, but the Visually-impaired
If you're like me and your design eye just sucks, this mini-app can be extremely useful. The WellStyled Color Scheme Generator [2] lets you visually select many different color schemes, and has very useful options, such as a "web safe color" mode and simulation of different modes of color blindness, allowing you to check the contrast of a palette from the eyes of many individuals. You can even save a configuration via hyperlink of your scheme.
Even if the color is high-contrast, your text may be too small for some eyes. I make a habit of using percentage values when picking a font size. It is resizable in all browsers, and it cascades more consistently across many browsers than using em heights to determine size.
Be helpful
Michigan State University recently launched a new standards-based accessible website. Part of being accessible is being helpful. If you use acronyms on your website a lot, use the proper tags and consider a glossary page that can be referenced. Include accesskeys and "skip to content" anchors. These do not even have to be visible to all browsers, they just have to be there. I visually hide my skip to content anchors on almost every site because the people who need it will probably not be viewing my content from the latest mainstream browser, where the meat of the page starts an inch or two from the top of the rendered content. ¤