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Accessible Web Design

Information - Web Design
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To be classified as accessible, web pages and web sites must conform to certain accessibility principles. These accessibility principles are known as the (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) when talking about content. These can be grouped into the following foremost areas:

  • Use semantic markup that provides meaningful structure to the document (i.e. web page)
  • Semantic markup in addition 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. Standards for semantic web are set by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
  • Use a valid mark-up language that conforms to a published Document Type Definition (DTD) or Schema
  • Provide alternative text equivalents for any non-text components (e.g. images, multimedia)
  • Use hyperlinks that are expressive and make sense when read out of context.
  • Don't use html frames
  • Use Cascading Style Sheets (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 comprehensible. (The use of tables for design will often result in information that is not.)

However the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) permits an exception where tables for layout either make sense when linearised or an alternate is made available.

Website accessibility is also being affected by Content Management Systems (CMS) that allow changes to be made to webpages without the need of obtaining programming language knowledge.
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