8 Steps to an Accessibile Site
As part of my campaign to spread decent web development practices, here are my 8 steps to an accessible site:
- Plan your content before design - Before you even start working on your design get the bare bones of your content marked up, headings, paragraphs, semantics etc.
- Test - Look at your site using normal browsers, text browsers, use a screen reader, put it through validators, do everything you can to see how well your site transfers to different client software.
- Keep images away from content - if your image can’t be summarised in a paragraph that fits in with your page content, keep it in the stylesheet. If it can then summarise that picture in it’s alt attribute.
- Keep links in lists - Have a navigation menu? Put it in a list, this is the best markup structure for a menu and gives you more control over the list than other structures.
- Ditch the generics - Are all your page titles the same? What about your meta descriptions? By changing these not only does it make your pages more helpful and interesting, it is also becoming more important to search engines.
- Use tables for table and nothing else - don’t use tables for layout! Tables are there to represent data in a table format, that is it. Have a dataset? Put it in a table.
- Check your colours - Could a person with colour blindness read your site? Do your text and background colours contrast well enough? Test, Test and Test!
- Go Naked! - Remove your stylesheet and images, can you still get all the content from your site? Is there anything missing? Can you still comment? This is an extension of testing, if you can’t read your site when it is naked, there is something wrong.
If you have done all the above then your site can be nothing but accessible. If you have any more tips please let me know, I would love to add to this list.