TECHNICAL TIPS Making websites more accessible to persons with disabilities (part I) David Mertz, Ph.D. August 2000 Tips on making your web pages and web sites disabled- accessible. Part I gives a general introduction to disability issues, and discusses the structural markup at the heart of HTML. Part II discusses specific HTML coding "gotchas" that make your pages unnecessarily difficult for vision and mobility limited people to use; part II also provides an overview of free tools to use in evaluating and improving the accessibility of your site. ISSUES TO START THINKING ABOUT ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Making your web site friendly to--or at least usable by--persons with disabilities expands yours audience; in some cases doing so might be mandated by law; and in every case, it is the -right- thing to do. Moreover, many of the techniques that go into making more disabled-accessible web pages wind up making web pages that are just plain -better- for everyone. People have a variety of differing abilities to operate computers, and corresponding to these abilities (as well as to their ability to pay for technologies) disabled persons employ a variety of tools and techniques to mediate their access to the internet. Blind or seriously visually impaired people might use screen readers or brail readers to translate pages. People with other visual impairements might use screen magnifiers, or might be unable to make color distinctions. People with neurological and mobility limitations might have difficulty operating a mouse and/or a keyboard; they might use special keyboards or spoken input to replace these. People with hearing loss or deafness will not be able to use sounds included in pages. And yet, all of these people are able to comprehend and utilize many types of information and functionality on the web... and probably most of the actual -information- on your web site if you take the effort to allow them to. There should be no reason why persons with disabilities should not be able to read about your organization or company, order products from you, complete forms and launch server processes (of the sort you implement), or participate in discussion areas (if you have them). If your site closes these options to persons with disabilities, the only reason is bad design on your part. THE VERY GOOD DESIGN OF HTML ------------------------------------------------------------------------ HTML was designed as a means for *structural* markup of hypertextual content. It was really -not- designed as a way of doing desktop publishing or graphic design, despite the number of tools that have tried to shoe-horn HTML into those functions. If you stick to the intention of HTML when you create HTML, you are probably 90% of the way toward making your site accessible. For example, any technical means of rendering a web page will have some reasonable way of conveying concepts like: "this is a paragraph", "this is a hyperlink", "this is a secondary heading." The basic semantic of structural elements will be rendered by speech synthesizers, or by brail, or by three-inch tall onscreen fonts. What might not be rendered in a manner appropriate for a header is something that you try to make *look* like a header by putting it in a certain font size, face, color and style, but without actually marking it with an