can anyone give me some tips or hook me up with some good links on this?
i'm having trouble finding much more than 'add alt text to the images' and i'm not sure how current the info is...
i get the whole semantic markup thing but could probably do with a bit more guidance on that too.
also not sure how things would work across different browsers....
thanks!
Check out this explaination from Alertbox:
Disabled Users and the Web (The article is from 1996...but the issues still hold true, if not more so today)
...then follow the link at the bottom to the 148 page report with Design Guidlines (the document is copyrighted 2001 so it must've been updated since the original).
The term for this is Accessibility. Take a look at the W3C's WAI Website. I've always found Juicy Studio to be an invaluable resource for articles discussing accessibility.
There are in-depth definitions that are difficult to master and implement. Examples include Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and Section 508.
A less than official suggestion is to make your site easy to navigate with a text browser. Don't rely on colors or structure to convey content. Don't rely on widgets for important functionality.
EDIT: Thought I would add that you shouldn't bother testing your site with JAWS or another screen reader. Your inability to navigate a site would be more related to your inexperience with the screen reader rather than the inaccessibility of the site. That said, having a sample of your target audience test your site for usability is highly beneficial.
EDIT #2: As discussed in comments, I intended to convey that you shouldn't make judgements on a site's usability based on your experiences with a screen reader. That said, I would recommend that anyone in Web development have exposure to the browsers/equipment used to view web sites including screen readers. It was poor wording in the original edit.
I am totally blind myself, and you'd be amazed how much stuff still doesn't have alt attributes on it after all these years... Be careful, there are still a lot of myths out there, such as no graphics allowed (wrong), talbes are bad (wrong) and frames are bad (wrong, though I realize frames are bad for other reasons.) Ideally you should have someone who is blind test your site, if you need further help on this feel free to email me at [email protected]. One other thing, try to make controls that actually do things buttons and/or links. Clickable divs aren't cool because it is not obvious that they do anything, and depending on which assistive technology you are using you may not even be able to click on them.
1) Use HTML's heading tags for each and every section of content on your pages. The heading tags are: h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6
2) Ensure the prior mentioned heading tags exist with the proper heirarchal sequence. For instance h1 tags are important than h2 tags. Screen readers use these heading tags to navigate the content of the page. If they not present or improperly ordered a visually impared user cannot navigate the page's content.
3) Don't use JavaScript to dynamically change the content on the screen without first prompting the user that text will change. If JavaScript changes text on the screen before a screen reader can read the content there is no way a visually impared user can know that content was changed.
4) Don't serve the user a 1000 images. If an image does not convey relevant content then make it a CSS background image.
5) Be gracious with the title attribute, especially on anchor tags. This can tell the user where they are about to go.
6) Don't put text on an image that cannot be conveyed as alternate content. The visually impared do not read images.
7) Ensure all your meta data is relevant. If you change any of your content be sure not to forget the extra bits of descriptive data.
8) AJAX defeats accessibility. Be kind with your use of AJAX.
9) The visually impared, and actually almost all visual users, do not care how pretty your pages are. They are there to get information, shop, or what ever other specific purpose. Make your data easy to understand and quick to retrieve. If a user cannot get in, get what they wanted, and then get out in record time they won't ever come back.
10) Do not use any presentation tags or presentation attributes in your HTML. Use a stylesheet. If your HTML contains presentation conventions they are probably not accessibile.
11) If your content exists in a different order visually than how it is written in the HTML, from top to bottom, it likely fails accessibility. Keep things orderly and consistent. Users expect content to flow from top to bottom and for tab indexing to follow the flow of content.
12) Do usability testing with screen reader software. It is not possible to know how accessible a page is by looking at.