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So, it's now illegal for an individual or company not to make their site blind-friendly.
The law just keeps getting better...
So, it's now illegal for an individual or company not to make their site blind-friendly.
The law just keeps getting better...
However ignorant I may sound, it should be the web designer's choice if they make it completely user-friendly, not some crappy law.
*is annoyed*
Just putting the title on a link to what it is allows that MS narrator thingy to read the links, even if they're images...
So I tried downloading one aimed at people who had disabilities, it read the title of my page, then stopped. How fun :)
The BBC site, of course, worked fine *grumble grumble*
But also, make sure you include descriptive ALT="" information for images, as well as more descriptive information within links, using the TITLE="" attribute.
- not good.
- better.
- better still.
Page 1 - not good.
Page 1 - better.
Page 1 - better still.
Its about being considerate to people who aren't able to view the images/pages as well as others. Screen readers will take care of passing on the information, you just have to be willing to spend an extra few seconds to make that information meaninful.
Don't be lazy.
As of OCtober 2002 it is now a discriminatory offence to restrict the use of public services to the disabled which includeds websites, but only those held by british registered companies (LTD's etc)
The minimum standard is to comply with the RNIB accessibility standards in this country but only to level/priority 1 (there are 2 in total) Thje only reason this has hit the news is due to the RNIB supporting over 100 cases of discrimination through websites going to court at the moment.
I'm currently studying this subject in deatil as the sites i look after have to be 508 compliant by the end of 2004 for the american domain, so at the same time, we will be trying to make our UK sites WAI compliant in the same time period, but 'tis a damn difficult task!
As for descriptive elements in pages, the correct way is the "longdesc" attribute which is a link from the image to a seperate text file containing descriptive text about that image i.e.
This is only relevant to images though. Links have to contain the "title" attribute, Forms have to be laid out using , tables should contain headers if used for data as well as a summary for that data. Sitres using CSS should still be accessibile if the CSS is switched off. Mark-up should strictly be only tags using css to style them... the list goes on!
My current project is to make the GUI for this 100% accessible: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/
So far we have: http://wip.blackwellpublishing.com/synergygui Its taken over 4 weeks just to get this far, but it's not until you get into the data driven stuff that you realise how expensive and complicated this can get!