Basic Standards
A lot of accessibility requirements are meet through good coding practice, so it is not difficult to meet the
Priority 1 guidelines for the WAI if you start out building your Website with accessibility in mind. Difficulties can arrive when you
need to produce a completely new version of a website to be DDA compliant, for instance if you have built the original using Flash. To produce an alternative
text version for instance would take a lot more man hours and mean extra charges for the client, and it is therefore necessary that you mention this
to them in such instances before designing and building.
Priority 2 and in particular priority 3 guidelines are more specific and involve making your Multimedia accessible to the disabled as
well as Multi-platform based (Such as WAP). This may be a request of the client and will involve much more work.
It may be worth reading about what is not accessible.
An overview of the Priority 1 guidelines
Below covers the main guidelines that apply to websites. All guidelines, however, will be met if you use the coding standards.
For a full checklist of all the WAI guidelines for Priorities 1, 2 and 3, Click here
1.1 Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element
This involves the use of things such as ALT tags, or [D] links and can be used for
alternatives to images, Flash etc.
2.1 Ensure that all information conveyed with color is also available without color
This meanson't have things in your page that say hit the red button, for example.
4.1 Clearly identify changes in the natural language of a document's text and any text equivalents
If the language changes to French within an English page for example, let the user know.
6.1 Organize documents so they may be read without style sheets.
For example, as all links are blue by default, if they are rendered white by the
Style Sheet and they sit on a Blue background, they aren't going to be visible when CSS is turned off.
7.1 Until user agents allow users to control flickering, avoid causing the screen to flicker.
This is for people who have seizures when they see rapid movement on screens, they must have a way of turning it off.
1.2 Provide redundant text links for each active region of a server-side image map.
ALT tags must be provided for all regions of an image map, as these will be picked up by Screen Readers and Text Browsers.
5.1 For data tables, identify row and column headers.
Data tables will need to be coded a specific way, which is outlined in Coding for accessibility.
6.3 Ensure that pages are usable when scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects are
turned off or not supported. If this is not possible, provide equivalent information on an alternative accessible page.
A lot of Javascript problems can be met by providing a NOSCRIPT alternative. This is not always the case and can sometimes require
a fair amount of extra work, for example when Javascript is used for Error Checking
11.4 If, after best efforts, you cannot create an accessible page, provide a link to an alternative page
that uses W3C technologies, is accessible, has equivalent information (or functionality), and is updated as
often as the inaccessible (original) page.
This involves Video, Flash, Audio, etc and can be met by providing the [D] link