Conforming to Accessibility Guidelines

Course Description:

Making your website accessible to all regardless of technical limitations or disability has become a
major issue for any company with a web presence. Websites designed without taking accessibility into consideration exclude certain sectors of the population, limit your customer base and may ultimately be illegal.

This course will enable you to ensure your site conforms to the WAI (W3C) Content Accessibility Guidelines. This course is an overview of accessibility guidelines, if you would prefer a more hands-on, two day practical course, please our Building Accessible Websites course outline.

This course includes the following modules:

Background to accessibility

• About the W3C
• About Webaim
• Development of WAI guidelines
• Why be accessible anyway?
• Overview of the current legal perspectiveh

Who has access issues?

• Identifying key disability groups
• Understanding the challenges disabled users face online
• Overview of technologies used by people with disabilities

Understanding the WAI guidelines

• How the guidelines are structured
• Rationale of dividing guidelines into degrees of priority
• Review of priority one guidelines
• Review of priority two guidelines
• Review of priority three guidelines

Compatibility and web design

• Using semantic markup and style sheets
• Navigation design issues
• Careful use of colour
• Problems with scripts and other dynamic content

Working with images, ALT and LONGDESC tags

• Using tables for layout (or not)
• Using frames and applets
• Accessible Flash
• Issues with web forms

Developing an action plan

• Auditing your site
• Text only browsers and a view of your site
• Using access checking tools
• Reading the results of a Bobby and wave test
• The W3C accessibility checklist
• Identifying the right level of accessibility

Questions and answers