Website accessibility

Five top tips for achieving accessibility on your website.

1. Images

All images must have an alternative description that exactly matches the content of the image - something that appears if the image is unavailable or needs to be read out by a screen-reader. It is not somewhere to put additional information - that should appear in the text if needed.

Examples:

the alternative description of this logo should be "The City of Edinburgh Council Children and Families"

the description of this button should be "Learning and Teaching"

Note: Your chosen web-publishing software probably has a specific way of adding a description to an image. The alternative description appears in the HTML code like this:

<img src="edinburgh-logo.gif" alt="City of Edinburgh Council">

2. All hyperlinks must describe where they link to

Examples:

• BAD EXAMPLE: Click here for latest news
  • This is no good - people using screen-readers and tabbing through the links will just hear "click here"
• GOOD EXAMPLE: Find out all the Latest news
  • This is better; the link itself describes where it goes to, and we've avoided using the term 'click here' (not everyone uses a mouse to navigate)

3. For downloads, warn the user

Example:

• Download issue 3 of our newsletter (PDF, 35kB)
  • this describes what the document is and warns the users that it is a PDF, as well as its size

4. Use Headings to structure your pages

Use headings to identify the key areas of a page, and use them in correct order.

Example:

• Edinburgh Grid for Learning home page (heading 1)
  • Latest news (heading 2)
    • School wins award (heading 3)
    • Funding for new project (heading 3)
    • Report goes public (heading 3)
  • Popular links (heading 2)
    • School websites (heading 3)
    • Term dates (heading 3)

5. Avoid using tables for layout – they should only be used to display data

Tables can disrupt the reading order of a page for people using screen-readers or similar technologies, and can also make a page slower to download. Their layout can vary greatly on different computers, and the pages often won't print properly either.

Further reading

These tips are just a few of the things you should look for when building and maintaining a website. For more information, follow the links below:

• Learning and Teaching Scotland has a guide for creating and managing a school website (PDF, 568kB), and also publish their own web standards.
• There is an excellent online forum for web accessibility at www.accessifyforum.com with regular discussions and a helpful community of individuals who are happy to advise on any accessibility-related issue.
• All of our websites should ideally be meeting level AA of the internationally-recognised Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG version 1.0). These guidelines were set out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Further details can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/.
• The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) provides some great resources on their website's Web Access Centre, including a comprehensive Design and Build checkpoints list.