Easy Web Site Design

The Web is accessed by a huge audience (over 800 million people as of September 2004) using a wide range of technologies. Accessibility is concerned with ensuring that your Web site is available to as large and diverse a group as possible.

In particular it is concerned with ensuring that Web content is available to people with disabilities who might be using assistive technologies such as text-to-speech synthesisers (screen readers). It can also ensure users with older computers and/or slower Internet connections are not excluded from accessing your site.

Accessibility concerns are not solely altruistic. The number of people worldwide with some form of disability represents a massive potential audience that few Web producers can afford to exclude. Additionally, much public service and educational provision is, or will soon, be subject to accessibility legislation, ie if you are producing a public service or educational Web site it may well be the law that you make it accessible.

Creating accessible applications does not have to be complex, in fact simpler is usually better. In many cases the principles of good design and accessible design are the same.

Some key principles are:

• Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define presentation. These may be overriden by users with particular needs.

• Use the ALT attribute to provide meaningful descriptions of images. This will not only benefit visually impaired users but also those with slow Internet connections who browse with images turned off.

  back to top

• Select easy to read, high contrast colour combinations, eg don't use yellow text on a white background. Avoid using high contrast images as backgrounds. Avoid colour combinations such as red and green which may not be distiguishable by people with colour blindness.

• Don't rely on colour alone to convey information as that information may not be accessible to colour blind people, or those with monchrome monitors. For example, using red text to indicate items in a list is not accessible. However, it would be acceptable to use bold red text (assuming other items are normal weight).

• Test sites on a variety of browsers and platforms, including a text-only browser; the bells and whistles won't work, but the textual content should be viewable and the site should be navigable. Also test with a text-to-speech synthesiser (screen reader).

See also

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

WebAIM - Web Accessibility in Mind WebAIM's mission is to expand the potential of the Web for people with disabilities by providing the knowledge, technical skills, tools, organizational leadership strategies, and vision that empower organizations to make their own content accessible to people with disabilities.

Bobby a free service will allow you to test web pages and help expose and repair barriers to accessibility and encourage compliance with existing accessibility guidelines, such as Section 508 and the W3C's WCAG.

Content authoring software producers such as Macromedia (Dreamweaver, Flash etc.) often publish guidelines on developing accessible applications with their software (eg see http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/accessibility/).

back to top