Introduction to Web Accessibility

A well-made Web page changes form to fit different needs:

• In Internet Explorer, the page is colorful text, graphics, photos and multimedia.
• On a cell phone it changes to black-on-white text with bold headings and descriptions of graphics, photos and multimedia.
• For someone who can't see, the page becomes words read out loud by adaptive software that also enables the user to jump from heading to heading, to skim a page audibly much as you would visually.
• For someone with a lesser visual impairment, the page's text can grow bigger and easier to read.
• Features that help people with disabilities also help search engines "see" and interpret what's on a Web page.
• Send the page to a printer and it may change fonts and layout to adapt to the difference between reading on screen and on paper.
• Save the page as text or copy and paste parts of it into a Word document and you may morph it as you like.

Accessibility techniques ensure that, when your Web page changes form, your content will still be there and will make sense.

Legal mandates

When you put “classroom or coursework materials” on the Web, you must make the information accessible to students with disabilities, according to Wright State’s World Wide Web Policy. The Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act require that people with disabilities be given equal access to information and activities on the Web. Specific Wright State Web accessibility requirements are spelled out in Wright State's Web Accessibility Standards and Web Accessibility Guidelines.

Writing for the Web

Compose documents to be read out loud. Keep your language concise and direct. Avoid complicated sentences. Write less formally, more conversationally, than you would for an academic journal.

As you write, think of the role each block of text plays in your document. What's a heading? What’s a paragraph? What’s a list? What’s a data table? With a Web page, you can add hidden tags that mark these different parts of your document. Then, someone who can’t see will be able to tell what’s what, and will find it easier to make sense of your page.

Screen readers

Screen reader software helps people with visual and learning disabilities by reading out loud the menus and documents on their computers. If you can’t see, you can’t use a mouse because you can’t tell where you’re pointing. So people who use screen readers navigate with keyboard commands. The following articles will help you understand more about what accessibility means to people with disabilities.

Locking Out the Disabled

Judy Heim (PC World.com, September 2000) describes the challenges many people with disabilities face trying to use the Web.

The HTML Challenge

Freedom Scientific, the maker of JAWS, describes how its screen reader handles a variety of Web page features.

What you need to know

For teaching online, you won’t have to memorize Wright State’s sixteen standards and five guidelines for Web accessibility. This is partly because some of them have nothing to do with online courses. More important, if you understand a little bit about how accessibility works, you’ll know what to do and can always look up how. To help you both understand accessibility and look up techniques, we’ve covered Web accessibility, topic by topic, in alphabetical order. You will also find specific instructions for making accessible Web pages with Microsoft Word. Soon, we will add instructions for using FrontPage and Dreamweaver.