"The power of the Web is in its universality.
Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."
Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web
Here are some good sites that I have come across relating to accessibility and the Web.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines The official recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Bobby online portal A free service to test and repair barriers to accessibility
Accessibility from HTML Source Straightforward advice and useful tips. The "Logical Style" page is particularly helpful.
Fujitsu web accessibility guidelines An impressive, comprehensive and well-structured guide.
Web Accessibility Learning Modules Step-by-step learning modules with clear objectives.
Do email me if you find any other good ones.
The Disability Discrimination Act places an obligation on all service providers to ensure that they take reasonable steps to provide access to their services for people with disabilities.
People with disabilities - for example those whose hearing and/or vision is impaired - may use specially designed software to access content on the internet.
As a first step in making the website for Our Lady of the Rosary accessible to all, I have worked through the pages on the website to make sure that they follow the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines on using cascading style sheets and valid markup with correctly declared Document Properties and character encoding. This ensures that our pages are "interoperable" - that is to say that they will be usable in all programs that are written to interpret standard markup - including those that are designed to help people with disabilities.
There are still many other things I need to do - some of them are listed below. I hope, however, that I have made a good start.
The "Valid xhtml" and "Valid css" links that I display are not simply an obscure badge of technical pride. They are an indication of our desire to make these web pages accessible to all.
The most thorough-going change I made was in making the headings properly structural rather than stylistic. Along with many others who started writing html in the mid-1990s, I had long-established bad habits of using headings to achieve stylistic effects. For example, the standard style of Heading 4 is much more sensible than Heading 2 for a normal subheading. However, we can now change all that with CSS to give Heading 2 a reasonable visual style. Those who are accessing content on the web without using visual cues will then be able to detect that a Heading 2 item is next in the hierarchy to Heading 1 and so on.
Of course, a proper logical structure to the content assists everyone in the end (including the person who creates a web site.)
After checking our site with Bobby, an excellent online checker for accessibility, I have identified some priorities for the website.
I should ensure that:
An interesting problem is the provision of an alternative for a script where the script is essential content. Mine is, of course. I've wrapped up the navigation menu in a simple script to avoid having to paste it into every page.
With html, there is the <object> tag but this is not properly implemented yet in the popular browswers.
I don't want to go down the route of using ASP because I want to avoid using proprietary software such as Microsoft'w Web Server and Frontpage extensions.
The route I intend to follow in due course is to use xml as a source for various things that can be treated as data and have pages draw content from an xml database.
What I have done to start with is to provide a page with a simple site-map for those trying to get to the content with software that doesn't support scripts. I have also learned from the Fujitsu web accessibility guidelines the importance of displaying page navigation which shows the user where the current page is in the structure of the site. This is another change I will have to make.
I have tried to resolve the following issues. Your feedback would be welcome if there are still problems. Please email me.
For example, I used to have a banner header that was in image rather than text. Not any more!
The "pop-up" windows issue is one that I gave some thought to. When the site was frame-based, the "target" attribute was vital. I'd got used to opening external links in another window (it was always pretty gruesome to open a link in one of your own frames) and I just presumed I should continue spawning new windows for external content. But reading around, I took the point that the user can generally do this for himself (usually by right-clicking and selecting "open in new window"). A disabled user, on the other hand, can be confused by new windows arrogantly blurting out all over the place! So I removed the "target"_attributes from all the <a> tags on the site. (If it turns out that we do need to spawn a new window anywhere, it must be clearly indicated that this will happen.)
An advantage of removing the "target" attributes is that when I've thoroughly checked it, I can then migrate to the Document Type Definition of "XHTML 1.0 Strict" from the current DTD of XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
Valid xhtml | Valid CSS For comments on this website, contact Fr Tim Finigan.