Links
- Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article).
- Whever possible, links are written to make sense out of context. Many browsers (such as JaWS, Home Page Reader, Lynx, and Opera) can extract the list of links on a page and allow the user to browse the list, separately from the page.
- Link text is never duplicated; two links with the same link text always point to the same address.
- There are no "
javascript:" pseudo-links. all links can be followed in any browser, even if scripting is turned off. - There are no links that open new windows without warning.
Images
- all content images used in the site include descriptive aLT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null aLT attributes.
- Multimedia elements (Flash) include LONGDESC attributes and links to text-only descriptions to explain each image to non-visual readers.
Visual design
This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.
- Internet Explorer has a limited text resizing feature ("View" menu, "Text Size") and this site has been designed to use relative font sizes to aid this.
- If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
Accessibility references
- W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
- W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.
- W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer's guide to accessibility.
- UK version to look up
- U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.
Accessibility software and services
- Bobby, a free service to analyze web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines.
- HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.
- Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.
- JaWS, a screen reader for Windows. a time-limited demo is available.
- Lynx, a free text-only web browser.