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Accessibility Top Tips and Advice
Granite 5's senior developer Peter Davison offers tips and advice on making your website accessible. Peter has visual impairments himself, with just five per cent vision, and uses screenreading and magnification technology at work.
People with physical impairments, sight or hearing difficulties, dyslexia and learning difficulties all use the web to access information, browse products and services, or to buy.
And under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), any website offering a product or service must not discriminate against people with physical or mental impairments.
People with disabilities are important customers and users. The Department for Work and Pensions estimates that there are over 10 million people with disabilities in Britain, and that disabled adults have a spending power of around £80 billion.
By making your website easier to use for these audiences, you will also help all users, including millions of people who use PDAs or mobile phones to browse the internet.
So keep everyone on side and you can boost your business!
Follow these top tips to interact with as many people as possible. And make your website one to bookmark.
- Make your site compatible with different browsing technologies such as screen readers and magnifiers, handheld devices and text-only browsers.
- Use clear and simple language so that written information is easily understood. Break up text into small, digestible sections. If jargon is used, provide some form of glossary.
- Provide appropriate alternative text descriptions for images that contribute to the information on the webpage. Decorative images should have no alternative text.
- Use contrasting colours for text and background and keep fonts simple and offer a non-colour alternative.
- To help standardise elements such as letter spacing, font size and colours, use Cascading StyleSheets (CSS) for layout and style wherever possible. These keep page presentation clear and consistent.
- If you have graphs and charts, give accompanying text on the same page or use a description link to explain them on a separate page.
- Provide transcripts of audio and descriptions of video.
- Clearly identify the target of each link and avoid the phrase "click here".
- Make sure that any tables on your website can be read line-by-line and also provide a summary of the chart's information.
- Visit the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.
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Accessibility tips download |
