Accessibility

"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."
-- Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web

If you are creating a Web site for your school are classroom then it is important that you make it accessible to all people. Many districts already require sites to meet the basic requirements of accessibility before they are published and most districts are not far behind.

Creating accessible Web sites is not only the right thing to do it is also not that difficult.

The first type of disability that comes to mind related to accessibility is vision. Obviously someone with a sight disability will have trouble using the internet in the way sighted people do. A blind person uses a software tool that reads web pages aloud. Actually what is read is the html which can be vary confusing and often not useful to the visitor. The main issue is often the graphics. Because the page readers can not really see the subject matter of the image it has no way of describing it o the user. To solve this problem the page reader looks into the html tag for the image and finds the alt attribute. If the designer has put a value for the alt attribute then the page reader read the value aloud. For example

<a href="/index.html">
<img src="images/button1.gif" alt="home">
</a>

In this example the image is a button that links back to the home page. With the alt attribute used the page reader would say something like "image link home". Which gives all the information that is needed. If the Alt attribute is not used the page reader would just say "image link" with no information as to where the link went. Not very accessible.

Vision is not the only disability to consider. Many people can't or don't use the mouse. If everything on your site relies on mouse roll-overs then your site becomes in accessible to a non mouse user.

Dreamweaver has a built in Accessibility checker that is very useful. When the report is run a list is returned detailing the areas that failed accessibility as well as suggestions for increased accessibility. For a demonstrations and instructions see the video tutorial below.