Beginning to think about building accessible pages can be a daunting task, especially when you are unfamiliar with techniques and guidelines. Creating an accessible page is a great deal easier if you use Dreamweaver. Other popular packages on campus, such as FrontPage and HomePage are outdated and lack a number of the tools available in Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver 4.0 even includes an accessibility tool to validate your page.
The W3C has a great Getting Started guide available on the web as well.
Don't depend on colors to convey information. Print your pages on a black and white printer. Check that you can still read all of your text and everything makes sense without color.
Open your page in Dreamweaver. Click on each image. Make sure you have a description of the image in the Alt box in the bottom left corner of your properties window. See the Creating Good Alt Tags for information on alt tags.
Most pages on campus will be accessible after adding alt tags.
If your page does not use sound, video, or animations you can skip this section.
Alternate representations need to be provided if your page contains other media types. A textual transcript is required for audio files. Closed captioning needs to be provided for video files. Descriptions need to be provided for video and other media (such as flash animations).
Check your links to ensure you can tell where they are pointing without any other text. Many people use click here as link text. This does not tell the user anything about the text. Instead of
Click here to access the course
home page.
Try
Click here to access the course home page.
Try to avoid using tables for layout. If you must use tables to arrange your web page, make sure the content makes sense when tables are read linearly. Text browsers read tables from left to right top to bottom. If each cell does not make sense read in this direction it needs to be changed so it does.
If your page uses frames it needs to be converted to a non frames based page. See the tutorial page on converting a frames page.
If you use image maps in your page make sure you use client side maps and include alt text for the links within the maps.
Check your work to make sure your page is accessible. Bobby is a web based utility that will show you where you have accessibility problems within your pages. Aprompt is a utility available for download for Windows machines.
See the tutorial page for detailed information.
- Main Page - UW Oshkosh Plan - Quickstart Page - Priority One Tutorial - Building Good Alt Tags - Converting a Page from Frames - Training - UW Oshkosh - Sitemap and Accessibility Features of this Site -
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