University Web Services
Best Practices
Accessibility
Every page at your site should be accessible to everyone, regardless of their disabilities. "Accessible" is defined as "compliant with the WCAG 2.0 standard." That standard is defined by the World Wide Web Consortium, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
The topic is subtle and complex, and there is no simple 1-2-3 for making pages accessible. You can educate yourself on the topic by pursuing the information in the Reference section of this site on Accessibility. Here is a short list that at least indicates the range of issues.
- Use alt tags
- Do not use color alone to convey meaning
- Avoid low contrast text
- Use skip navigation on menus
- Multimedia requires both transcriptions and descriptions (usually understood as "caption your video" but really covers more than that)
- Any applet or script must provide an alternate method of interaction
- Documents must be readable without a stylesheet
- Anything that requires a plugin requires a link to a place to download the plugin
- Forms must be able to be filled out with assistive technologies
- PDF files must provide an html equivalent
- Anything requiring a timed response must allow the user to have more time
There's more, of course. This list is meant to be indicative, not definitive.