Minute44 - Dan Schonhaar

I’ve got the site looking pretty much how I want it now and the next step is going to be taking on the very important task of getting the site’s accessibility in order.

Accessibility is very important for sites on today’s Internet. It is fast becoming a legal requirement for business sites to meet certain criteria in terms of accessibility. The idea is to allow people with disabilities use the site as easily as an able bodied user. Perhaps your visitor has impaired vision and needs to increase the font size, perhaps they can’t use a mouse and rely on keyboard shortcuts to navigate the site or maybe they are totally blind and require a screen reader. All of these factors and many more have to be taken into account when making your site accessible.

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) operates a three tier rating structure for site accessibility. The ratings are A, AA and AAA depending on what criteria are satisfied. At the moment this site validates as A and is very close to being valid AA standard. It also meets the criteria for Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. This only applies in the USA but it is a good certification to have. Most of the criteria are easy to satisfy such as making sure all of your images have text alternatives and making sure links are separated by at least one character so they are easily distinguished on the page.

Other criteria can be more tricky. For example, one stipulation I have to satisfy in order to earn AA status is that all unique links must have unique link text. For example; you can’t have multiple “Click Here…” links all pointing to different things. This is because, for accessibility, your link text must give some description of the content it is linking to and must also identify itself as a unique link. This gave me a problem because I use the “more” feature within WordPress to truncate posts so users can click a “Read more..” link to read the rest of the post. By default, however, all the “more” links had the same link text. I needed to figure out a way to make each link unique. I solved this by making each “more” link have link text that includes the name of the post it applies to. For example, the “more” link for this post will read “Continue Reading Accessibility – The Way Forward” Making the link unique on the page.

Over the coming weeks I aim to bring this site into line with WAI – AA standards. I will try to gain the full AAA rating but, a lot of the time, this is overkill and will be nigh on impossible for me to achieve due to the number of dynamic links I have in the site from places like Empire. I will try to satisfy as many criteria from the AAA guidelines as I can though in order to make my site viewable by as many people as possible. This will include the use of access keys, a form of keyboard shortcut that I will use in my main navigation. Basically it will allow non-mouse users to select any of my main navigation links by doing key combinations such as Shift+Alt+1, Shitf+Alt+2 etc.

My galleries will present a challenge in themselves as they are simply lists of links with no printable characters between them. For this reason alone they fail to achieve AA status. I will do my best to remedy this and keep you all posted as progress is made.

Ciao