Top Tips for web developers – some ideas for meeting the Priority 1 W3C Guidelines.   Check out the list below for some simple ideas on how to make your website more accessible.

• The World Wide Web guidelines http://www.w3.org/WAI/ explain how to make multimedia content more accessible to a wide audience.
• People who are blind or who have turned off images due to slow internet connections need content text presented in a variety of ways to ensure it conveys the same function or purpose as auditory or visual content.
• Icons and pre-recorded speech can make documents accessible to people with low literacy, cognitive disabilities, learning disabilities and deafness.
• An auditory description of a visual track benefits people who cannot see the visual information.
• People who cannot differentiate between certain colors and users with devices that have non-color or non-visual displays will not receive information unless text and graphics are understandable without colour.
• When there is a language change in a document, for example the use of a Latin name of a plant or animal, that change must be ‘marked up’ for screen readers to be able to read it for blind or vision impaired people.
• The mark up of natural (human) language changes in a document improves readability of the web for all people and allows search engines to find key words.
• Ensure pages can be read without style sheets and content organised logically - text generated by style sheets is not available to assistive technologies.
• Screen flicker can make a page unreadable for people with epilepsy, blind or visually impaired. Screen readers are unable to read moving text.
• Consider that some users might be using old readers and browsers, requiring use of interim accessibility solutions for operation.
• Use clear and consistent navigation mechanisms, ensuring link text is meaningful when read out of context.
• Use plain English to improve communication.
• Only use tables to mark up tabular information not to layout pages. Beware that use of tables causes problems for screen readers.
• Data tables that have two or more logical levels of row or column headers, use mark up to associate data cells and header cells.
• Validate accessibility methods in the early stages of development.