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Tips for Accessible Web Pages
In early March, a project team was formed to draft a web accessibility policy and roadmap for Miami web sites/systems for university approval and adoption. The nine-person team, consisting of web developers and web support staff from across the university, will be making its recommendations by the end of June 2006. In the meantime, here are three easy things you can do now to increase the accessibility of any web page:
- Make sure you provide a text equivalent for non-text elements on your Web pages. For example, use alternative text (ALT or LONGDESC) attributes when inserting images (except in the examples in #2 below), ensuring you give enough information to help a person using a screen reader understand the content of the picture. If there’s text in the image, remember to repeat the text word-for-word.
- Use “empty” ALT attributes (alt="") if your image is a graphical bullet or spacer image. This allows most screen readers to ignore the image and prevents them from announcing the name of the file along with legitimate text, which would be distracting or confusing for the listener.
- Clearly identify the target of each link by stating plainly where the link will take someone if they click it. For example, “Learn more about on-campus dining services for students” is more useful than “click here.”
For more accessibility tips, visit the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative site or WebAIM.org. For general web development tips, see the Miami Knowledge Base case #20140 “Web development tips”.
If you have questions or would like to provide input for Miami’s web accessibility policy and roadmap project, please contact one of the project co-managers:
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