Web Accessibility

What is Web Accessibility?

The word accessibility is the "ability" to "access" and really this is why this topic is important. So, we design web pages to have the "ability" to "access" information to include everyone, regardless of disability. The simple definition of accessible is to be able to reach, approach, use, obtain or easily understand content. Accessibility circumscribes many solutions and is best looked at as an on-going process to encompass as many people possible the ability to access web data.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

The WCAG is part of a series of web accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (WW3), the main international standards organization created for the internet. These are guidelines designed specifically to how to make content more accessible, predominatly for people with disabilities. There are 12 guidelines organized under four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. To view the guidelines broken down please click on guidelines from Wikipedia.

WCAG 2.0 Perceivable

Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.

This Colour Blindness Simulator from Etre is a good place to start.

Color palettes from colorsafe.co are based on WCAG guidelines of text and background contrast ratios.

WCAG 2.0 Operable

User interface components and naviagtion must be operable, i.e. no flickering of .gifs because these can cause seizures, good functionality from a keyboard, and to provide ways to help users navigate with time to read or use content.

Utilize an online free service, CynthiaSays, to help users identify errors in their web content related to WCAG 2.0 guidelines.

Siteimprove is another business to check your site for WCAG issues.

WCAG 2.0 Understandable

Information and the operation of user interface must be understandable. That includes making text content readable and have web pages appear and operate in predictable ways which will help users avoid and correct mistakes.

WAVE, a free community service by WebAIM is used to evaluate the accesibility of millions of webpages.

Dreamscape Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing disabled individuals with the accessibility tools and educational accomodations to help assist people with disabilities.

WCAG 2.0 Robust

Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.

The Fangs Screen Reader Emulator is a free Firefox extension that creates a text prepresentation of a web page.

JAWS is free in the demo version as a screen reader software for Windows.