What is accessibility? What we are talking about is the accessibility of a website. Can your website be viewed by people using other mediums? Or can it be used by deaf people? A common mistake people make is that accessibility is something for people with a handicap. Dont think that way; Accessibility is for ALL your website users. One guy might be deaf, the other one might has a small screen resolution, and another guy might not want to load images. All those people should see a normal website with good understandable content.

Validation

As always, validate your website. Validation is an important part of developing your website. There could be a small error in your HTML or CSS, and your testing browsers render it the good way. But what happens when an older browser doesn’t render it correct, or render it at all? Visitors with that older browser might not see all the content and/or miss some parts. Therefore, always try your website in different browsers and versions and most importantly, validate your HTML and CSS.

Different mediums

Not all people are visiting your website on the standard computer, with the standard browser. There are also people visiting via a cell phone, while many browsers can be using different settings, as well as versions and screen resolutions. Is there a way to develop your website for all those different types? No, you can’t. The only thing you can do is check your website in all different types of mediums and look if there is something you can do about a possible display error. Keep this in mind.

Images

Remember, there are people who are on a dial connection. Those visitors have to wait a long time before a website loads. In order to make a webpage load faster, they often browse the internet without images. On the spot the image would have been located their browser displays the ‘ALT’ text. Therefore, adding an ‘ALT’ text is a MUST for making your page more accessible.

Some images are located in the content. When an image doesn’t load, the alt text is displayed inside the content. Visitors might read over it and don’t see there is an image located. Make it noticeable. Try something like this: ‘ — CSS MENU EXAMPLE – -’. This will not tell people you are using an image, but it’ll get noticed much more and faster. Alt texts are also good for an extra keyword for onsite search engine optimizing.

Watch out for background images as well. When not loading images, the text could get lost in the background because there isn’t a proper contrast. Those people should be able to read the content too. Make sure your font color is readable when the images are turned off. A good way to check this is to try it yourself in your own browser.

Colors

Some older browsers don’t recognize color ‘names’. Example, ‘green’ won’t be displayed the way it should in some very old browsers. They usually use the standard value if they don’t recognize what to do with the entered value. A way to have more browsers render the colors you have chosen, use the color’s prefix. 99.9% if not 100% of the browsers render prefixes the correct way.

The ‘FONT’ element

Some time ago, I read an article on accessibility, and they told me something I didn’t know about the ‘FONT’ element. In a lot of browsers, it is possible to change the standard used font, font color and background color. When using the following codes on your website, it is possible the browser will use this color. The user defined its own colors, but they won’t be used there. The background color doesn’t change and this might cause problems with readability of the content.

Javascript

When using Javascript, remember there are people who have it turned off. Those people should still be able to use your page the way it should. Always try to avoid Javascript in important parts of your website like navigation. If you are going to use it, use it in a proper way and make sure people can use the important parts.

That’s it

As I told you before, it isn’t possible to make your website 100% accessible for all visitors out there. The only thing you could do is optimize your webpage the best possible way, by following some tips given today in this article.

If you want more information on this subject, I suggest you should take a look at the ‘Webmaster Guidelines by Google‘. Google rewards Accessibility by better index and rank your pages. Another page you should visit is the ‘W3′s Accessibility guide‘, where you can get some more in-depth information together with a guide your website should comply to if you think accessibility is important.

Thanks for reading and see you next time!