Website Accessibility Fundamentals — A 2 day course

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 Closed In-House Course

Synopis

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.

Suitable For

Web designers

Web developers

Web usability consultants

HR managers and other managers concerned with web accessibility compliance

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.

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

Contents

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 search tabindex and content management systems (CMS) tabindex tips and tricks
• Accessible imagemap navigation
• DHTML/JavaScript navigation: just say no
• Site Maps

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 col colgroup scope="" 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 fieldset option 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