Web Site Accessibility
Guidelines for SCS Webmasters

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What is Accessibility? - Making Your Web Site Accessible
Checklist for Accessibility
Must Have Items - Should Have Items - Try To Have Items
Items for More Experienced Webmasters
Apply These Items if Your Use These Special Features

Applets & Scripts
Blinking, Moving, or Flickering Content
Color
CSS
Forms
Frames
Graphs

Web Design Hints for SCS Webmasters

Text Equivalents

Rationale

Nongraphical browsers and screen readers cannot reveal images (and other non-text elements) to visually impaired users. To communicate the information users need, it is important to associate alternative text with all images, particularly active images such as links or buttons. It is also necessary to provide text equivalents for other non-text elements (graphical representations of text - including symbols, image map hot spots, animations - animated GIFs, applets and programmatic objects, ASCII art, frames, scripts, images used as list bullets, spacers, graphical buttons, sounds (played with or without interaction), stand-alone audio files, audio tracks of video, and video.

The alternative text should be meaningful, like "home page" or "search" or "go." When images are not active links, however, use alternative text appropriately. A person who listens to information cannot ignore text as a person viewing the page can ignore an image. If images are not important or if they are redundant, then assign empty alternative text so that the assistive technology and nongraphical browser ignore the image.

The use of alternative text is not just for people who have visual impairments; alternative text is also used by text-only browsers, displayless devices, such as mobile phone browsers, and by search engines. Links that are images are not accessible to voice recognition software unless the author has provided alternative text for the image. The user, navigating the Web with voice recognition, can say "click home page" for the image whose alternative text is "home page". On any given web page, it is important that each image acting as a link has a unique ALT tag for most voice recognition software to work effectively.

 

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Graphs and Charts
- LONGDESC, D LINK, Invisible D LINK

 

What is Accessibility? - Making Your Web Site Accessible
Checklist for Accessibility
Must Have Items - Should Have Items - Try To Have Items
Items for More Experienced Webmasters
Apply These Items if Your Use These Special Features

Applets & Scripts
Blinking, Moving, or Flickering Content
Color
CSS
Forms
Frames
Graphs

Web Design Hints for SCS Webmasters