Bristol Web Designer » Accessibility

Accessible web design

imaker — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 09:23:56 +0000

When displaying images when should you use ALT and TITLE attributes? I was recently asked this and it got me thinking about the what and why.

According to the W3C the ALT attribute is required, but the TITLE attribute is not.

The ALT attribute is used as a text equivalent of the image, i.e. it should convey the same information as the image, and is used by screen readers to give and audio instead of visual representation of a web page. ALT is supposed to be shown only when the image itself is not displayed, for example if you turn off images in your browser. IE/Win shows the ALT text as a tool-tip, but that’s not the correct behaviour according to the spec.

When using the ALT attribute you should be using no more than one or two sentences, if you need more then you can use the LONGDESC attribute to point to a longer description.

The TITLE attribute is an ‘advisory title’ which you can use to convey additional information. TITLE is shown by browsers that support it, even when the image is visible, and even IE uses TITLE instead of ALT, if it’s specified.

It is rarely useful to have the same text in ALT and in TITLE. They are meant for very different purposes.

Is accessibility enough?

imaker — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 14:25:44 +0000

If you hunt around our site enough you should find a link that says it has passed the W3C guidelines on accessibility. However Jacob Nielsen, who is one of the leading usability experts, has just published an article with the title of ‘Accessibility Is Not Enough‘. It raises some worthwhile points and is well worth the read, summarised as “A strict focus on accessibility as a scorecard item doesn’t help users with disabilities. To help these users accomplish critical tasks, you must adopt a usability perspective”. You can find the article by following the title link.

Accessibility and your website, why bother?

imaker — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 11:54:19 +0000

Accessibility is about everyone being able to access content online regardless of any physical impairment they may have. There are statutes that compel all web sites to be accessible. iMaker endeavour to build your website to be as accessible as possible, but that means more work for us, so how does it benefit you, the client?

Better search rankings. Search engines find it easier to catalogue web sites that are written for accessibility. As the majority of people find things on the internet using search engines, the easier you can make the engines job, the better for you.

Long term Cost. Building an accessible web site means separating content from presentation to produce a content (xhtml) page and a presentation (css) page. These two files combine to provide the browser with the whole web page for display. There could be many thousands of html files in your site but only one css file. If you want to change the layout for your site you just need to change the one css file, that will change the layout for the entire site!

Compatibility. Again building an accessible site should mean that your site looks the same in any browser, certainly the most popular, such as Internet explorer, Opera, Firefox and Safari. All your users will see the website as you do.

Speed. A website built for accessibility will load much quicker than one that hasn’t and so keep your visitors happy and hopefully interested.