Website accessibility Hints and Tips

Introduction

E-recruitment creates potential barriers to employment for an estimated 1.3m of the 6.9m disabled people in the UK of working age¹, with a few relativity simple steps you can address one of the key barriers by making your site accessible.

Research by Cornell University found 75 percent of corporate e-recruitment sites tested where inaccessible for disabled applicants (Unpublished report - August 2002)

Typically key issues include:

Images not labelled properly with an alternative text description
Inconsistent Navigation including poor hypertext link text
Inaccessible forms for blind web users who use screen reader software
Information validation techniques which cause problems with Adaptive technology used by disabled people
Information laid out in tables for example job listings are frequently not coded properly for accessibility

This section on accessibility hints and tips explains these problems in more detail and provides solutions on how to fix them. It also gives an introduction to the range of adaptive technology used by disabled peoples and the key disability groups that have issues interacting with the web.

The guidance here is not exhaustively detailed, so where necessary you will be pointed to additional resources, which cover individual topics in more depth,such as the Macromedia paper on E-recruitment.

There is also a quick reference checklist to help you.

References

¹ McKinsey Report - Making E-recruitment Barrier-free for People with Disabilities Building an accessible website