Assessing the accessibility of hundreds of web sites around the world has allowed researchers in Hungary to figure out ten of the most important improvements and modifications webmasters can make to improve the accessibility of their sites to people with disabilities or special needss. The team looked at 500 sites in 18 countries were tested with XValid in all. They were then able to analyze the data they accrued and to work out ten minimal guidelines for making web sites more accessible to everyone. The researchers suggest that the issue of ensuring equitable access for all regarding age and ability will become increasingly important as we become increasingly dependent on the world wide web as a source of information and knowledge.
The team suggests that the following ten guidelines would improve accessibility to more than half of the sites tested at low cost and with a very low barrier to implementation. Many of the points simply allude to good html coding others are more specific to improving accessibility:
1 Provide alternative short text for all non-text elements (such as images), if one is unable to write a short description, then use a longer piece of text rather than nothing.
2 Use relative positioning, rather than absolute so that different types of browser for different needs can cope.
3 The content of the site must be fully accessible without the need to use a mouse (the rendering of content should not depend on JavaScript event handlers/modal windows or other mouse-driven events.
4 Use the <label> tag to define the form of different elements, or least a minimum use the title attribute.
5 The text of references has to be intelligible beyond its context in the page.
6 The primary language must be defined in the <html> tag using the langattribute.
7 A web site should provide summaries for tables using the summary attribute within the <table> tag.
8 Separating characters must be used between hyperlinks.
9 The <title> tag must identify the subject of the web page correctly.
10 All html should be validated and html tags closed correctly, so that assistive technologies can parse the content accurately without manual intervention or correction.
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