Accessibility Standards for Websites

i’m amazed that more marketers can’t talk intelligently on the subject of accessible website design. it’s been 12 years since the white house endorsed the website accessibility initiative. there are a slew of reasons why accessibility matters, but here are two for marketers – 1) those with disabilities and seniors with visual/motor limitations may struggle to make online purchases in a non-accessible environment; 2) search engines prefer accessible websites! if you normally fake it ’til you make it on this topic, then this post is for you. i provide several wiki links, since the subject is a bit technical. click on!

courtesy of wikipedia – the following is information on what makes a website “accessible.”

to be accessible, web pages and sites must conform to certain principles. collectively, these accessibility principles are known as the wcag (website content accessibility guidelines).

• use semantic markup that provides a meaningful structure to the web page.
• semantic markup also refers to semantically organizing the web page structure and publishing web services description accordingly so that they can be recognized by other web services on different web pages. semantic standards are set by ieee.
• use a valid markup language that conforms to a published dtd (document type definition) or schema.
• provide text equivalents for any non-text components (e.g. images, multimedia).
• use hyperlinks that make sense when read out of context. (e.g. avoid “click here.”)
• don’t use frames.
• use css rather than html tables for layout.
• author the page so that when the source code is read line-by-line by user agents (such as a screen readers) it remains intelligible. (using tables for design will often result in information that is not.)

w3c permits an exception where tables for layout either make sense when linearized or an alternate version (perhaps linearized) is made available. website accessibility is also changing as it is impacted by content management systems that allow changes to be made to webpages without the need of obtaining programming language knowledge.