Web Site Accessibility

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Web Site Accessibility

• Ian Senior
• November 2003

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Aim of talk

• To give an overview of the problem
• To describe the legal situation
• To show some good and bad practice
• To point to some help

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What is Accessibility?

• Web content can be obtained and understood by as
  many potential viewers as possible, regardless of
  the user agent they employ or the constraints
  under which they operate.
  University of Buffalo NY State.

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The problem

• 1 in 10 visitors is disabled in some way. Access
  is impeded by not allowing for people
• with forms of colour-impaired vision
• slow modems and lines
• turning off graphics
• who find it hard to read long sentences

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The problem

• who only have a 640 x 480 monochrome screen
• unable to read small fonts
• who prefer to use Linux
• who cannot use a mouse
• who cannot hear properly
• oh, yes, and people who cannot see!

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Ways to use the web

• Remember that viewing sites with IE is not the
  only way to use the web. Think of technologies
  like
• Synthetic speech (screen reader)
• Paper printout
• Dynamic braille
• Keyboard only
• Text-mode browsers
• Web-enabled cars
• Mobile phones and PDAs

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The legal situation

• The 1995 Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) is
  relevant.
• Since 1st September 2002, the Special Educational
  Needs and Disability Act (SENDA) has been in
  force. This act became part IV of the DDA and
  bring higher and further education under the
  protection of this legislation.

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What does SENDA say?

• SENDA makes it unlawful to
• Treat disabled people less favourably than their
  non-disabled peers, for a reason relating to
  their disability
• Fail to provide reasonable adjustments for
  disabled students.

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SENDA
SENDA seeks to provide disabled students with
access to all the facilities and services of
FE/HE organisation. SENDA is an anticipatory
Act, meaning organisations have to adjust their
working practices for disabled people regardless
of whether they are presently at the
organisation or not. This means web sites have
to be accessible to all visitors and not just
registered users.
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Australian legal case

• Maguire vs Sydney Olympic Games
• Failed to provide accessible site
• Defence of unjustifiable hardship rejected
• 20,000 fine
• Case could be used in UK
• There have been no legal test cases in the UK so
  far.

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Poor excuses for non-compliance

• Sorry, I am not interested
• We don't have any disabled people
• We don't have the time or expertise
• It's not my problem, I'll wait until everyone
  else does something
• My system won't let me
• No-one else is fixing their sites
• I don't know what to fix

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How not to help your visitors
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Whos page is that?
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Web Standards

• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They develop
  interoperable technologies toLead the web to
  its full potential as a forum for commerce,
  information, communication and collective
  understanding

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Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

• W3C programme to
• Ensure web technologies support accessibility
• Developing guidelines for accessibility
• Developing tools to evaluate and facilitate
  accessibility
• Conduct education and outreach
• Co-ordinating web design with R D

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WAI checkpoints

• WAI have produced a list of checkpoints for
  web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) 1.0
• This is a hierarchical structure consisting of
  three priority levels
• Priority 1 (level A)
• Priority 2 (level AA)
• Priority 3 (level AAA)

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Priority 1

• This is the minimum level of accessibility web
  developers should be working towards. While this
  removes some accessibility barriers, many
  disabled students would still be excluded from
  using a site.e.g Use Alt tags on images

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Priority 2

• Achieving this level will remove more barriers to
  accessibility although some students will still
  be excluded.
• e.g. Link form elements with their labels

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Priority 3

• Satisfying this highest level will provide access
  for the vast majority of disabled people.
• e.g. separate adjacent links with more than white
  space

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Aim high

• What priority level should we achieve?
• FE/HE institutions should regard priority 1 as
  the starting point for a web site.
• Priority 2 is the standard level expected
• Priority 3 is the ideal level

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Basic web design issues

• It is not hard to get the simple things right
• Be realistic don't make technology assumptions
• Don't be lazy and do it all with images
• Don't use non-intuitive navigation aids
• Make your site consistent
• Use simple language
• Provide text versions
• Leave control of appearance to CSS
• Structure your web pages correctly (H1 tags etc.)

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Make consistency rules

• Make house rules and stick to them. Keep your
  pages consistent.
• Create a visual identity that holds all your
  pages together. This will help everyone.
• Decide on a technology and make everyone use it.
  Don't mix Flash and XML and PDF in the same small
  site.

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Dyslexia and cognitive disabilities

• Write short sentences
• Use consistent layout
• Don't flash at people or use multi-coloured
  backgrounds
• Keep sentences below 20 words
• Use white space
• Say one thing at a time

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HTML 4.01

• Current standard for HTML
• Comes in 3 versions
• Strict document type definition (DTD)
• Transitional DTD
• Frameset DTD
• The strict DTD will produce a web site that
  complies to all three priority levels, the other
  two make compliance very difficult above level 1

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Tools to aid compliance

• Evaluation tools
• analyse pages and produce a report
• Repair tools
• Identify and help to fix page problems
• Filter and transformation tools
• Assist web users by modifying a page or
  supplement assistive technology or browser

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Opera browser features

• When developing a site it is helpful to
• see how accessible your new site is.
• A very quick way is to use Opera. This
• has accessibility options
• Linearize tables
• Turn on/off graphics
• Turn on/off CSS author user versions
• Zoom in on text
• Turn on/off JavaScript

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WAVE software

• Allows you to add a button to the links bar of
  your browser.
• Clicking the button opens up WAVE which examines
  the page for accessibility.

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WAVE home page
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WAVE in action good site
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WAVE in action poor site
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HTML Standard page

• Give DOCTYPE DTD
• State document language
• If table used in page design use the summary tag
  layout table text
• Include skip navigation link
• Use headers for structure only style through
  CSS if necessary
• Consider a CSS approach to page layout

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More HTML

• TITLE attribute
• describe a link
• Acronym element
• Abbreviation element
• ACCESSKEY
• TABINDEX attribute
• cycle logically through links

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Graphics

• Use alt attribute on all images
• Spacer image used in design only alt
• Graphics used as bullets alt
• Information graphics should have sensible alt
  text
• Use longdesc attribute for complex images e.g.
  graphs, detailed images. Alternatively link image
  via D text

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HTML - Tables

• Make your table as simple as possible
• Add summary of information for data tables
• Associate table column row headings with cells
• Attributes include TH, ID, headers, scope
• THEAD, TBODY, TFOOT also available
• Give your table a caption
• Check readability when linearized using Lynx or
  Opera

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HTML Forms

• Use clear language
• Use form accessibility tags
• For, ID, name, label,
• Group related items together
• fieldset, optgroup and legend
• Add hints to text boxes
• Make PDF documents more accessible using Acrobat
  6

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Cascading style sheets

• Allow for - font family serif, sans-serif,
  cursive - font size tiny or huge - colour,
  background and foreground - white space around
  objects - what links look like - borders around
  things - to be controlled in one place- allow
  the user to override it.
• Not all browsers implement CSS properly (Netscape
  4).

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With CSS
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Without CSS
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What are we doing?

• We use XML to mark up our pages
• We can deliver pages in different forms PDF,
  print ready, XML, HTML
• We are developing a method to allow users to
  select their own colour schemes
• We provide a text only selection
• We are developing an automatic accessibility XSLT
  style sheet.

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What are we going to do?

• Make our tables more accessible
• Make our forms more accessible
• Try to future proof our site as much as possible

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Conclusions

• Accessibility is all about people being able
  to obtain information from the web.
• Legal requirement through SENDA
• Write W3C compliant code
• Use HTML 4.01 strict DTD as your starting level
• Aim for at least priority 2 standard
• Use CSS for site styles
• Use the validation tools from W3C and others to
  check site compliance.

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Useful sites

• Web Accessibility Initiative http//www.w3c.org/WA
  I/
• W3 Consortiumhttp//www.w3c.org
• TechDis (JISC Funded)http//www.techdis.ac.uk/

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More sites

• http//www.rnib.org.uk/digital/ The RNIB's
  practical take on web access
• http//www.useit.com/ Industry commentary on
  useability of web sites
• http//vischeck.com/ Check your understanding of
  colour blindness

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Validators other tools

• Site Viewing Tool http//www.anybrowser.com/sitevi
  ewer.html
• HTML Tidy Tool http//www.w3c.org/People/Raggett/t
  idy/
• HTML Validatorhttp//validator.w3.org/
• CSS Validator http//jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
  

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Checking tools

• Wave http//www.wave.webaim.org/index.jsp
• Bobby http//bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/ind
  ex.jsp
• Aprompthttp//aprompt.snow.utoronto.ca/
• Vischeck http//www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeck
  URL.php
• Lifthttp//www.usablenet.com/

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Talk found at

• This talk is downloadable fromhttp//users.ox.a
  c.uk/ian/
• PDF and PowerPoint versions available