Introduction to
Web Design

Usability

Information
Architecture

Confirm
Accessibility

Accessibility
Exercise

Search Engine
Optimisation

Prepare Web-site Content

Create, Maintain
& Validate a Site

Accessibility Exercise
Richard Langley

This exercise is to determine the accessibility of web pages and how to make them more accessible. The initial site (index page) that these tests were carried out on was uploaded in July 2003. The site has since been revised and upgraded.

Step 1. Validation

My initial document http://oocities.com/richardjlangley/index.htm was applied to the validating site http://validator.w3.org .

The predominant invalid code from my index page was line 12 Logo.gif, where the required “ALT” tag was not specified. There were a series of errors for line 31 requesting end tags for elements “OBJECT” and “LAYER” which were not open. However, the text from line 31 was generated by the server and was beyond design control.

It is important that the code is edited to be valid so that all groups can access information in a web document. In this case it is a Priority 1 impact on accessibility which states there must be text equivalent for every non-text element on the page. The omission of ALT tags here will prevent ‘Screen Reading” software from conveying the meaning of the page, disadvantaging the visually impaired. Also if the image has been turned off or is corrupted on the server, all users will be unclear on what the image should be conveying.

A second site http://oocities.com/urshtafe/index.htm was applied to the validation program. In this case the predominant errors were:
• Requires attribute “ALT” tags not always specified.
• Opening tags not on own line (Convention of Web Authoring Tool).
• Quotes missing around attributes eg should read bgColor=“0000FF”.

Step 2. Accessibility

The two sites were tested on three accessibility testing sites Bobby, Dr Watson and Cynthia. In my case with the preliminary index.htm, the result was failure on all tree sites because of the failure to supply an “ALT” tag to the Logo.gif image.

With the urshtafe/index.htm page the result was also Passed – No, again primarily because of the checkpoint 508 Standards, Section 1194.22,(a) that states, “A text equivalent for every non-text element shall be provided (e.g.,via “alt”,”longdesc”, or in element content. As stated above it is a Priority 1 impact on accessibility which will prevent ‘Screen Reading” software from conveying the meaning of the page, disadvantaging the visually impaired. (Ref. Confirm Accessibility)

The second site also contained several empty “ALT” tags however according to Bobby the main content of the page was readable.