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"Online content that can be used by someone with or without a disability."
As a designer you want people visit, stay, and revisit your web site. Make the information most wanted center stage, per say. Have the content straightforward and in logical order. The information needs to be interesting to the user. Your navigation links should be easy to use, giving the user smooth transition from one page to the next. Limit the information to a 'three-click rule', have what the user needs within three pages.
The World Wide Web Consortium is an organization that handles the standardizing code for the web. They make sure that people with disabilities will have the same access to the web and viewing it as easy as people without disabilities. Some disabilities include blindness, low vision, color blindness, deafness, hardness of hearing, physical disabilities, cognitive and neurological disabilities.
The W3C gives you some pages on their site that allows you to prepare a accessible site. Fourteen guidelines, priorities, and checkpoints you should become familiar with. Click this link for techniques and examples for making your web site. You can also create CSS to make your page more accessible. HTML provides another way to create user friendly pages.
When your web site is complete you can check and analyze if your Dreamweaver CS3 document is fully accessible. Choose File > Check Page > Accessibility. When the Results page appears you can right-click on an entry and choose More Info that gives you the UsableNet Accessibility Reference Guide and provides insight of the errors.
Understanding the W3C Accessibility Guidelines
Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
CSS Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
HTML Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
Questions Answered from exploring WEB DESIGN page 120
1. In your own words, define web accessibility.
Web accessibility is giving all people the ability to view the content on the Internet as easily in one place as another.
2. What is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)?
American with Disabilities Act is a law passed in Congress that states no one with a disability can be discriminated against by the government or a private company.
3. How does the ADA apply to web design?
There are categories that checklist the things you must fix, should fix, and things you may fix to make the accessibility to everyone. Blindness, low vision, color blindness, deafness, hard of hearing, and other physical disabilities are things to take into consideration.
4. What does it mean to simplify the content of your site?
Don't put unnecessary things in your site, people want to find what they want easily. If you crowd your page with too much information the viewer is likely to leave and not return.
5. What does it mean to simplify the navigation of your site?
Group your information on the menu bar. List things from general to specific in topic.
6. How many clicks should it take to get from any page to any other page in your site?
Three
7. Name two things you can do to make your site more accessible to the visually impaired.
Text-to-speech translators and Braille translators
8. Name something you can incorporate into your design that can make your site more accessible to people with low vision, as well as people with color blindness.
Customize a style sheet with lists of fonts (avoid cursive) and properties that low vision people can apply to your site. For color blindness avoid using red-green combinations. You can convert your artwork to a grayscale, if you can't see it then the color blind will not be able to either.
9. If you have audio content on your site, what can you do to make sure people with hearing disabilities can also appreciate it?
Captions and dialogue should be available for music videos and movie clips.
10. What can you do to make your site more user-friendly for those who have a hard time using a mouse?
You can use special HTML attributes called ACCESSKEY, that enables a person to press Alt and a specific key to go straight to a section desired.
11. What three things can you do to make your site easier for a person with cognitive disabilities to use?
Keep your navigation and menu structure simple, use graphics as anchors for long strings of text, and make it available to turn off moving graphics or music.
Form Object Accessibility
The form object needs to be enclosed in the <form> tag to work properly. The <label> tag allows the text to be identified within screen readers.
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