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Web Design and Accessibility

Ensuring your website is accessible isn't aspixels (px) or (pt) instead use relative
hard as you would imagine. There are a numberlength units such as percent or (em) or use
of steps that can be taken to make a websiteabsolute size ([ xx-small | x-small | small |
accessible.medium | large | x-large | xx-large ]) or
relative size ([ larger | smaller ]) when
defining the font size for a particular
element  within  your  web  pages.
1. Page organisation. Use headings, lists,
and consistent structure. Use CSS for5. Accessible navigation. Build your website
layout and style where possible. Useso that the pages can be accessed using only
structural semantic markup to aida keyboard. Features such as ACCESSKEY and
navigation rather than for presentationTABINDEX can make your pages easier to
effect this will help visitors withnavigate. Ensure that the accesskeys you
specialised software to understand thechoose don't clash with keystroke
organisation of the page and to navigatecombinations which have already been reserved
through it. Reduce information overload byby other applications. Skip links which
simplifying text and by ensuring abypass content and go to main navigation
simplified, consistent design throughout theareas  can  also  be  helpful.
site.
6. Use high contrast colours for text. Use
2. Use valid code. Make sure HTML code isdark text on light backgrounds. For most
validated against W3C standards. Not onlypeople, this increases site readability.
does valid code make it easier for assistiveAlso, consider that 10% of men are colour
technologies such as screen readers toblind so red/green or blue/yellow
'understand' your web pages, but browserscombinations can potentially cause a problem.
and browsing technologies tend to prefer it
too!7. Ensure links make sense out of context.
Blind people often skip through the links on
3. Write meaningful ALT text. Label ALLa web page. This makes it vital that links
images with ALT (alternative) tags; withoutmake sense out of context. 'Click here for
ALT tags a website might be virtuallymore information on our latest holiday
unusable for a blind visitor. This alsooffers' is a lot more useful to a blind web
applies to all multimedia including audio,user  than  'Click  here' or 'Find out more'.
videos, applets, etc where captioning and
transcripts  should  be  provided.8. Make forms accessible. All form fields
should have 'prompt' text associated
4. Make text scalable. Partially-sightedexplicitly with them. These are called
people need to be able to resize text.label tags. A web user can then click their
Internet Explorer doesn't allow themouse or pointing device on this prompt text
resizing of text if font-size is set into move the cursor into that form field.



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