Web Accessibility Tips.

What things can you do to make your website more user friendly and accessible? There are many things that make or break a website. Getting targeted traffic, Increasing search engine rankings and Improving your website accessibility / usability are all things that make a website a successful website and they are generally not exclusive.

Here are 3 fundamental web accessibility tips.

1. Well organised and systematic web page layout.

A well designed web page will work in your favour if you do it correctly. It is generally acceptable to use a logo in the top left of your screen, either a horizontal or vertical easy to see navigation bar close to this logo for people to navigate your website through the various pages. By using the The global structure of an HTML document, issued by the World Wide Web Consortium you can be more certain that you website is more accessible and user frieldly to your visitors.

This is a recommended read: http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40-970708/struct/global.html

2. Links and Navigation to your website.

As mentioned you want to have an easy to see website navigation system to your website. By having an easy to see and use navigation to your website, visitors can easily reach the information they are looking for within your website. In addition to having a main navigation from your visitors, it is important to provide other, more prominent links to various sections to your website. People are inclined to click on blue underlined links within a web page, because people are already programmed to thinking that blue underlined text is a web link on a page. Sometimes larger blue underlined links on a website can prove to be very beneficial from an accessibility standpoint.

3. Positioning of logos and banners.

Logos and banners on a web page are generally located at the top of the page, this improves visibility of the content area on the screen, doesn’t clutter the web page and in addition provides for an eye catching location for your visitors. It is vital to keep this consistant through out your website. Logos and banners provide your visitors with confidence that they are on the website they want to be on and have not ended up on a different website.

4. Images ALT tags and link TITLE tags.

Providing ALT and TITLE tags to images on your screen are a vital part of accessibility. It is very easy to assume that because you see your website a certain way, that everybody is going to see it the same way. the reality of this is that most people will see your website the way you see it in your browser but, there are people who will have issues viewing your website the way it was designed for.

  • Providing ALT tags to images.

When you hover over an image on a website and a “help tip” label pops up. This is the result of using the ALT tag in a webpage. When you specify the alt attribute in your webpage you embed it in the <img src=”" alt=”"></img> like this and sometimes on rare occasions when webpages don’t load the way they are meant to if an image is not displayed often the ALT tag is provided instead as a filler. If you don’t specify an ALT tag for your images, nothing will populate that area and your users may be discouraged.

  • Providing TITLE tags.

Similar to the ALT attribute the title attribute will display a “help tip” when a user hovers over a link to another page or a resource. You can populate the title attribute by inserting it in to the <a href=”" title=”"></a>. This may be information on where the link will take the user before the link is clicked, or possibly inform the user that this is a link to a PDF document and not a webpage.

5. Create a page footer.

Creating a footer for your webpage is vital to accessibility and usability. When people finish reading a web page they will see the footer contents, that is of course if you have a footer on your page. A footer in your web page is a useful area to mention copyright information, links to larger sub-sections in your website or any last minute notes to include on your webpage.