Along with the excitement of the world-wide web and the ability to make colorful, attractive web pages comes the inaccessibility of those pages to the disabled. There are a few things that a web page designer can do to make their pages accessible. Note that you can integrate accessibility in to your page without taking away the attractiveness.

The alt tag

Graphical images can enhance a web document greatly. However, to someone using a text-based browser, all they'll see is [Image]. This doesn't tell the user much, and to a company, this can mean the loss of a customer.

The ALT tag enables you to add a text description of a graphic image. The user of the text-based browser will see that text description. The user of the graphical browser will see the image, or if they have graphics turned off, the description.

To do this, just add alt="Put your description here, in the quotes" immediately after the img src="picture.gif" tag.

Avoid wordy descriptions

When you describe something, keep it to the point. Some details of the text description may not be necessary. Full sentences are seldom necessary.

For example, let's say you had a list of items, and you use a graphical bullet. You can make the text description of that bullet:
alt="This is a little red ball."
But that would clutter the screen and get pretty monotonous in a long list of items.

Perhaps a better description would be:
alt="Bullet"
or
alt="O"

The same goes for descriptions of logos and art. Only tell what the user needs to know, and leave it there.

Imagemaps and Java

Although accessibility to imagemaps and Java is starting to be developed, most visually impaired users still don't have access to such technology. If you want your page to be accessible to the masses, make an alternate way for the user to access the data behind those graphical objects.

One such way of doing this is a text-only page. This means, however, that you have to maintain two web pages -- the regular page and the text-only page. If you are willing to do this, then just place a link to the text-only version near the top of the regular page so that users can easily find it.

Another solution is to have text links below the graphical links. This means having two links to each item from the page, but it only requires updating one page. This method is preferred by most users, as they know the information is always up-to-date.

A third solution is using meta tags. Use the meta tag to display one thing to the user if they're using a non-graphical browser (IE Links), and another for all other browsers. Although a little more complicated, this is the best way of handling the situation. The user sees no extra clutter on the screen, and the developer only needs to maintain one html document.

Frames

Most web browsers now support frames, a nice way of dividing data in to separate portions of a web page. This, however, can be a nightmare to a visually impaired user. Text-based browsers still don't present the frames in an easy-to-navigate format. Graphical browsers, with speech output, give little to no indication of how the frames are laid out.

A way around this is the noframes html tag. Simply create a noframes version of your page enclosed in noframes and /noframes. The user of a text-based browser will see this instead of the frames pages. You may want to have this noframes page simply have links to each of the frames, explaining what each frame is.

If you can't do this, then at least give your frames good, logical names. Something more than "Main" is preferred. This way, at least the user can have some idea of where they are on the page.

Colors

Users with some vision may have trouble reading light text on light background, or dark text on a dark background. Color selections is an important part of accessibility.

The only thing to watch out for here is keeping a good contrast between your text and your background. As long as the text sticks out well, a low-vision computer user won't have trouble with this.

This page was produced by Keith Wessel, information accessibility specialist, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Please send comments or questions to kwessel@ncsa.uiuc.edu.