Accessibility overview.

| June 12, 2004, 3:36 pm

Organisations are now beginning to take accessibility of web sites more seriously, particularly where poor accessibility constitutes a denial of access to products and services, for example on an eCommerce site.

In an ideal world all web sites would be accessible, however the reality is that accessibility has been the victim of the way in which many web sites have been designed and built, the use of visual design tools has speeded up the development of sites and made it easier for anyone to do. However the reduction in understanding of the actual code that exists within the page has lead to pages designed to look good at the expense of the underlying meaning of the code. It is this meaning that must be maintained for the page to be accessible to a wide range of browsing devices such as aural browsers and screen readers.

For example; the <h1> tag denotes a main heading, adding meaning to the content, however a designer may not like the default size and style of the tag and choose to use a <font> tag instead, so the meaning of the code is undermined.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends the use of CSS to separate the styling and design of the page from its meaning, a separate file contains all of the design information for any page that links to it, so retaining the integrity of the meaning of a document for whatever piece of software interprets it.

Just how accessible a site is can be a difficult thing to measure, with automated validation only giving a rudimentary check, as much of what makes a page accessible is down to how much sense it makes when accessed by someone with a physical or visual impairment.

There are however rating systems to measure how accessible a site is and according to a Disability Rights Commission (DRC) report in an audit of 1,000 web sites 81% of web sites fail to meet the minimum (A) level of compliance, only 2 reached the higher (AA) level of compliance and none the highest (AAA) level of compliance.

Common Accessibility Issues:
  • Not using alt tags to describe images.
  • Poor contrast and small type sizes.
  • Inability to scale type via the browser.
  • Poor page structure with little semantic meaning.
  • Site requires Javascript to function.

Source: Disability Rights Commission.

Further Reading:
W3C Accessibility resources
Studio24.net
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