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Practical Website Accessibility - A 2-Day Course
Website Acessibility Course Overview
This website accessibility training course focuses on the practical problems
that UK website designers (and web developers) need to overcome in order to
meet web accessibility standards set by the W3C’s Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the Disability Rights Commission (Under the
Discrimination Act - DDA).
This course tries not to take sides in ideological debates about what
constitutes ‘true’ website accessibility and for whom; although it
does provide considerable detail on the different requirements of different
disability groups. Instead, the course explains the technical options for
achieving specified accessibility goals, and the practical consequences of
choosing one path over another. Where there are tensions or contradictions
between various goals and options, the course provides best practice advice on
the costs and benefits of different methods for balancing them.
The website accessibility goals around which the course is organised are
largely those outlined in the WCAG, in the Disability Rights Commission’s
Code of Practice for websites, and in well-known reports by voluntary
bodies like the RNIB.
Target Audience For This Website Acessibility Course
- Web designers
- Web developers
- Web usability consultants
- HR managers and other managers concerned with web accessibility compliance
Website Accessibility Course Prerequisites
- A basic understanding of HTML/XHTML and CSS
- Somewhat more than basic computer literacy
- An interest in web accessibility
- An open mind
Note: Although web design skills are distinctly advantageous,
delegates are not expected to have advanced knowledge of, or be highly skilled
in, hand-coding HTML/CSS. The first and final requirements are only listed
here, because good web accessibility sometimes conflicts with popular
(mis)conceptions about what web design is and how it should be practiced.
Website Accessibility Course Delivery
This website accessibility course is instructor-led. The vast majority of
the course modules include hands-on exercises, which offer delegates the
opportunity to practice and experiment with the techniques discussed by the
tutor. Introductory modules on the first morning are largely informative,
rather than technical, in nature. As a consequence, they typically conclude
with whole class discussion rather than practical exercises.
Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices
Central London — £575 (+VAT)
- 24–25 Jul 2008
- 25–26 Sep 2008
- 27–28 Nov 2008
Website Accessibility Course Outline
Website Accessibility Overview
- Why bother with website accessibility?
- What sort of website accessibility, and for whom?
- Different groups of disabled people
- Deaf
- Hard-of-hearing
- Hearing-impaired
- Blind
- Visually-impaired
- Low-vision
- Mobility-impaired
- Learning-disabled
- etc
- Different accessibility problems
- Shared and common accessibility problems
- Web accessibility and ‘non-web’ accessibility
- Website accessibility standards
- Website accessibility tools and technologies
- Browser and platform compatibility
Assistive technologies
- Screen readers and aural interfaces
- Braille displays
- Switch-click input devices
- TDD/TTYs
- Modified keyboards, mice and similar input devices
- Magnifiers
- OCR
- Speech recognition
- Touch screens
- Head/eye control
- Word prediction and correction
Web Accessibility and UK Law
- Legal requirements
- Disability Discrimination Act (DDA)
- Disability Rights Commission (DRC)
- DRC Powers and DDA enforcement
- DDA Code of Practice and the WAI
- RNIB
- Remedies outside the courts
- Case studies
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
- The WAI project
- The WAI’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
- 3 Levels of WCAG compliance: A, AA, AAA
- Key requirements of the WCAG
- Relationship between the WCAG and UK Government guidelines
- WCAG and compliance testing
- Automated tests: Cynthia, Bobby, Web Exact, etc.
- Manual checks and checklists
HTML Markup and Web Accessibility
- Understanding markup
- Page structure, presentation and semantics
- Choosing the right element
- HTML versus XHTML
- Strict versus Transitional versus Frameset DOCTYPEs
- Deprecated elements
- DOCTYPES and browser quirks modes
- Developer and designer tools
- Author tools and content management systems (CMS)
CSS Styling and Web Accessibility
- Separating content from presentation
- The cascade, inheritance, specifity
- Fonts, colours and other text properties
- Table-less page layout
- Using lists for navigation
- Columns and other layout techniques
- Specifying
media
- Accessibility-specific media
- Aural stylesheets
- Print stylesheets
- Using
:before and :after pseudo-classes
Accessible Images and Imaging
- The most ‘visible’ web accessibility problem (pun intended)
- Simple versus complex image problems
- Well-intentioned but counter productive accessibility methods
- The infamous
alt="spacer.gif"
- Providing alternative text descriptions:
alt, title and longdesc attributes
- Mixing
alt and title safely
- Problems with using
longdesc effectively
- Problems with D-links
<object> versus <embed>- The
<iframe> option
- Arrows and bullets
- Ascii art
- Background images and borders
- Charts and Graphs: a really hard nut to crack
- Maps
- Outlines and hierchies
- Ratings
- Photo galleries
- SVG
Accessible Links and Navigation
- Usability and accessibility
- Key terms:
tabs, navbar, etc.
- Understanding focus and cursors
- Consistent and unambiguous navigation structures
- How and why to skip navigation
- Skipping 2-part navigation structures
- Navigation skipping and search
- Other page landmarks
- Page extremities
- Identifying link destinations (with
title)
- Linking to page fragments with and without conventional anchors
- Using
name= and id= attributes
- Visible vs invisible anchors
- Problems with link destination markup
- Separating consecutive text links
- Specifying keyboard shortcuts for links
accesskey - (Browser) problems with
accesskey
accesskey tips and tricks- Using the tab key for navigation
tabindex- Problems with the
tabindex concept
- (Browser) problems with the
tabindex
tabindex and forms, including searchtabindex and content management systems (CMS)tabindex tips and tricks- Accessible imagemap navigation
- DHTML/JavaScript navigation: just say no
- Site Maps
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Text and Colour
- The problem with text-only parallel sites
- Headers and tabbing
- Heading order and level
- Phrasal markup (
em, strong, cite, etc.)
- Accessibility-related phrasal markup (
abbr, acronym, etc.)
- Quotes, blockquotes and quotation marks (using the
cite and lang attributes)
- Specifying language and encoding
- Type size, scalability, magnification and halation.
- Text quantity/complexity and the learning disabled
- Text colour and colour deficiencies (protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia, etc).
- Colour adjacency/overlap and colour combinations
- Estimated and system colours for links
- Text as images
HTML Tables
- Data tables versus layout tables
- Nesting and other things to avoid in table design
- Metadata in tables
- Using headers, footers and titles for data tables.
- Table structure
colcolgroupscope=""id=""- Finding relevant data in cells
- Random access to table cells
Forms
- Problems with forms and assistive technology
- Keyboard control
- Moving to and within forms
- Form completion by selection
- Grouping form elements
fieldsetoption and optgroup- Associating
labels with form elements
- Using
title attributes
- Graphical buttons
- Pre-filled form fields
- Re-thinking form layout with serialisation in mind
- Predictive tyoing and error checking
- Dynamic (conditional) forms – provide parallel HTML-based advance
- Contacts: phone numbers, ‘text’ phones (TTYs) and relay services for the hearing impaired.
- Mail/print services and braille
Multimedia & scripting
- Audio versus video
- (Browser) problems with the multimedia
object element
- Alternative data streams and captioning in multimedia formats (quicktime, Real, Windows media, Flash, MPEG, etc)
- Multiple alternate feeds
- Support for the Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL)
- Microsoft’s non-standard Synchronised Access Media Interchange (SAMI)
- Problems with multimedia player interfaces
- Captioning options (DIY Anime versus professional agency captioning)
- Captioning and transcription styles
- Captioning tools: MAGpie, CCaption, etc.
- Transcription versus text description
- Text description versus audio narration
- Accessible Flash
- Issues with Javascript and other browser scripting languages.
- Providing keyboard-based alternatives to mouse events
Certification and Testing
- Choosing your Level of WCAG compliance: A, AA, AAA
- Deciding, publishing and auditing policy
- Retrofitting accessibility while updating old pages
- Retritting priorities: popular pages, essential pages, highly innaccessible pages, etc
- Priorities for new pages: WCAG Level 1 (A)
- Small exceptions to full compliance
- Testing with Cynthia
- The problem with Bobby
- Testing with screen readers
- Testing with human subjects: disabled and non-disabled
- Emacspeak
Coming and Future Options
- Serial versus random access
- Rich audio interfaces (not screen readers)
- Random access using metadata and standardised grammar for sections
- The database/CMS problem and open source software
- Repair tools ... A-Prompt on steroids?
- Training in subjective assessment
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Publicly Scheduled Training Locations
We currently run public training courses in the following locations:
- London, UK
- Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK
- Birmingham, West Midlands, UK
- Carshalton, Surrey, UK
- Chester, North West, UK
- Coventry, West Midlands, UK
- Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
- Glasgow, Scotland, UK
- Harwell, Oxfordshire, UK
- Manchester, North West, UK
- Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, UK
- Newark, Nottinghamshire, UK
- Reading, Berkshire, UK
- Slough, Berkshire, UK
- Stevenage, Hertfordshire, UK
- Wakefield, West Yorkshire, UK
- Wokingham, Berkshire, UK
Most UK public training courses are available on a monthly basis.
Please see the individual course outlines or our public
training schedule
for details.
In-house (on-site) training locations
We deliver in-house courses at client premises and/or training facilities in
any part of the world which is practically and commercially accessible.
Our In-house training guidelines
outline our basic requirements and our UK pricing structure. To estimate costs
for training in other countries, simply convert to your local currency and then
make a rough calculation of our tutor's costs for travelling to and staying at
your location.
Web Standards Compliance
A good way of assessing the quality of website design training, is to find
out whether or not the training company's own web site complies with web
standards. Ours does.
Every website which adheres to these W3C standards makes the web a little
more useful and a little easier to use. Conversely, every site which breaks
them not only irritates potential customers, but also undermines the
interoperability upon which the basic functions of the web depend.
If you ever find a non-compliant page on our site, please let us know. It's
most likely to be the result of a momentary lapse in concentration (e.g. markup
typos) and will be fixed immediately.
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