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RE: Site Accessibility Tipsheet - your suggestions?

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From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Feb 17, 2006 9:00AM

> I'd really appreciate input from this community on an
> assignment I've been given. I will be creating a "tipsheet"
> to provide to people who want an overview of the basic things
> to know about making an accessible website, whether it's
> being retrofitted or built from scratch.

Since we're rolling out our own CMS right now and training people on
entering content, I've been working on something simliar as well. What I
have now (in summary form):

- avoid 'click here' language for links
- use semantic markup*
- Avoid uploading your word files for download. Instead, migrate
the content into the CMS (HTML)
- when adding a document for download, give both a Word and PDF version
as options**
- Try not to be overly verbose. Use as much, and only as much,
text as needed to communicate the message.

* the typical example I give is how to create a word document. To create
a headline in Word, one can either go to the style menu and choose
HEADER 1, or they can change their FONT to impact, their FONT SIZE to
36, and COLOR to fucia. I then explain how the first option is semantic,
while the second option is just pure decoration and offers no meaning to
the end-user. The other biggie is getting people to use UL and OL
properly and often. I catch people all the time actually numbering their
paragraphs individually inline without using the list tools.

** We're an MS shop so much of our content is coming from Word files.
Many of these word files are not semantic, either, using option 2
mentioned above for formatting. As such, they're not terribly accessible
to begin with, but it's a start for us at least getting them into two
file formats.

Since our guidelines are focused solely on content entry, they don't
include overall site accessibility issues that we're trying to
accommodate on our end:

- CSS layouts
- proper use of skip-to... links
- avoiding fly-out navigation (which is a chore, I'm finding)

-Darrel