Website accessibility Hints and Tips

Other accessibility issues

Font sizing

The benefit of relative font sizes over absolute or fixed font sizes (e.g. px) is that applicants with vision impairment can enlarge the page text to make it easier to read. It is recommended that you tell them how to change their font sizes via browser options, for example - via the 'text size' option in view menu in Internet Explorer. If you use relative font sizes you must test your Website is legible at different font sizes. [W3C 3.4]:

An alternative approach is to provide a menu of fonts and font sizes on your site to switch between styles - this will give you more control over how your site will look in different fonts and font sizes. An example can been seen as http://www.section508.gov

If you do use this option please use server side scripts such as ASP, PHP or JSP - not JavaScript to switch styles.

Colour contrast

People with poor vision and people who cannot differentiate between colours will find it difficult to distinguish between text and background unless there is sufficient contrast. For example, do not put white text on a pale or pastel background, or black text on a dark colour background.

Flash

Up until the release of Flash MX in spring 2002, Flash was one of the most inaccessible technologies used on the Web. Flash MX's new accessibility features only work with the latest versions of two Screen readers : Window-Eyes, and its main competitor JAWS.

Currently for accessibility, Flash should be used to enhance an HTML page not replace it. For Flash menus provide an alternative accessible version

For Flash movies embedded in a web page you need to add a text description and relevant hypertext link describing the function of the code otherwise they will just see a non descriptive empty 'Object' tag

If you use Flash movies embedded in your page they can cause problems to keyboard users - they become stuck in the movie and cannot go forwards or backwards, Macromedia are aware of this problem and one recommend fix is available at:http://www.sonokids.com/tabnew.html

Multimedia

Audio clips or speech should have alternative descriptions and/or a text transcription to make them accessible to people with hearing impairments.

Video clips should have a descriptive audio option for Blind users. Windows media player, QuickTime and Real player All have captioning options. Also provide text transcripts

The National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) provides examples of accessible multimedia and a free tool called MAGpie which adds captions to video more details on their Website at http://ncam.wgbh.org/richmedia/

Frames

When people using screen readers or text browsers such as Lynx visit a web page with frames they must decide which frame to open because they are presented with a list of frames available on a page rather than the single page you have with a standard browser.

This is why meaningful frames titles should be used so they can easily identify the frame they want to open.

This is straightforward to implement, for each frame referenced in a FRAMESET page give a meaningful name and title attribute.

Language change

Always specify any changes from one language to another in the page text such as from English to French using the lang tag

<P> english text <SPAN lang="fr"> je ne sais quoi</SPAN> english text</P>