Ensuring Accessibility?
By Web Design Services Team on Jan 16, 2007 in Accessibility, Frequently Asked Questions, Web Design
What can I do to make my sure my site is accessible? The sorts of limitations covered by the DDA include visual impairments, colour blindness, dyslexia and physical impairments that prevent use of a keyboard or mouse. The actions you can take include ensuring that screen readers can read your site, that colours are not crucial to its meaning, that navigation does not require image shape recognition. Make sure your site can be viewed on all browsers (including outdated and text only browsers) and on a variety of output devices - including mobile phones and PDAs.
There are some simple steps you can take. For example, use ALT tags on images, so that a blind user knows what content an image has. Allow users to resize fonts. Make sure there is a high contrast between text and background. Other steps may require a major redesign and you might benefit from specialist knowledge.
Compuskills Web Design service endeavour to adhere to the DDA with all our sites and are able to provide specialist advice on request.
Technorati Tags: DDA Disability Discrimination Act Accessibility standards web design Compuskills web standards usability
3 Comment(s)
By Tom
on Jan 16, 2007 | Reply
A step to accessibility might be not using a CAPTCHA. See http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/ for why, CAPTCHA’s just don’t work.
By Web Design Services Team
on Jan 17, 2007 | Reply
Very valid comment. However, given the sheer volume of spam messages sent here it becomes a difficult issue of balancing one thing out against another.
One alternative is for all comments to be held in a moderation queue but, personally, I feel that undermines the interactive nature of being able to make comments.
You have raised a very interesting point though and this is something we will look into, probably with a view to producing a new “FAQ” or blog entry dedicated to the topic.
By Hw
on Jan 17, 2007 | Reply
I think this authentication code is a good idea.
I personally object to having to register to comment on blogs.
When I am looking at blogs or websites I often want to comment but think better of it when I find I have to register with a site. Who knows which spamlists they are getting into and what they may lay themselves open to, by handing over email addresses and other details to people who can get your IP from a post.
This stops me from casually responding to posts that I might otherwise want to. It means that I can normally only respond to blogs from the best known organisations, since I have some chance of trusting them not to flood me with spam, use a worm to access my networkk and so on.
So I like this way of validating comments.