Introduction to Accessibility
Workshop Goals
- Broad overview of accessibility
- Raising awareness
- Illustrating common problems
- Outlining University position
What is Accessibility?
- Subset of usability.
- Universal design.
- Broader issues, but we'll focus on electronic content and specifically Web pages.
Who Benefits?
- Everyone.
- Curb cuts.
- Handheld/mobile. Text-only.
- Universal design forces you to think about how information is organized.
How do We Design for Accessibility?
- Use standards. Ensure pages degrade gracefully.
- Provide metadata, description, alternate means of accessing content.
- Linearization.
- Validate and test.
- Run it by disabled users.
Why Do It At All?
- Federal and state law.
- University guidelines.
- DE funding.
- Increase your audience and their ability to use your site.
- Impress your peers and look cool.
Specific Issues
- ALT attributes in image tags. Empty ALT's (alt=" ")
- Skip navigation features.
- Separating content and presentation!
- Tabular data.
- Web standards.
- Multimedia.