I’ve just read the Accessibility section of e-Consultancy’s newly released ‘Web Design Best Practice Guide’. It is huge and insightful. Obviously I’ll read more of the report but just wanted to quickly share what seems such sensible advice that alarmingly is not widely carried out in practice.

Although we don’t need to answer the question ‘Why bother?’ for all it’s political incorrectness, it is worth reminding ourselves: Accessibility is intended for more people in the UK than we probably realise. There are about 8.6m people (14% of the population) registered disabled. These and many more people need an accessible site for different reasons, including but not limited to; can’t use a standard keyboard, screen or mouse easily or at all, need screen readers, are blind, have limited sight, are colour blind or are dyslexic.

The e-Consultancy advice is clear and easy to understand. Because seemingly few sites actually fully follow this advice, I thought it would be convenient to have a brief check list for future consideration.

The reasons for an Accessibility page is: “for users to know what features are available for them to use and apply” rather than how good the site is at compliance against formal regulations – so no need for all that jargon either!

1. Page Name/title. Use ‘Accessibility Help’ or ‘Accessibility’ rather than the overly formal ‘Accessibility Statement’ or ‘Accessibility Policy’. Rather like making links meaningful this goes along with not hyper linking statements such as click here but instead making go to car section the hyperlink instead.

The content on the page should provide help for users and allow them to address:

2. Changing text size.
3. Changing colour.
4. Changing contrast.

In my experience a lot of sites that address accessibility stop here.

Read on and see what they are missing out:

5. Screenreader use.
a. Popular software-based screen readers:
• Jaws (www.freedomscientific.com/fs_products/software_jaws.asp)
• Window Eyes (www.gwmicro.com)
• Hal and Supernova (www.yourdolphin.com)
b. Popular text-to-speech readers
• Browsealoud (www.browsealoud.com)
• ReadSpeaker (www.readspeaker.com)
c. Text Only browsing
• Lynx (http://lynx.browser.org)

6. Mobile device.
a. Seen a site on a phone recently? Yes… needs addressing.

7. Access Keys.
a. Use the stardard keys with number rather than letters – letters can get mixed up with the copy.

8. Alternative text for images.

9. Skip to content, navigation feature.

10. Which platforms, browsers and screen resolution the site supports.
a. Platforms: PC, Laptops, PDAs, Smartphones, Game consoles, Mobile
b. Browser popularity: Microsoft IE; 85.2%, Mozilla Firefox 12.1%, Apple Safari , .6%, Opera 0.7%, Netscape 0.1%
c. Screen Resolution: 1024 x 768: 56.2%, 1280 x 1024: 15.8%, 800 x 600; 12.0%, 1280 x 800; 4.1%, 1152 846; 3.9%. NB those with big screens often DON’T maximise their browser window to full screen!

11. What guidelines the site aims to meet

This is more for the whole site, and as we know there are many more elements of accessibility for a site, but I thought I’d raise awareness by mentioning it here:

12. Site map. Where users can access pages from the site map – click through.

Can you recommend some good examples where all these are addressed on the Accessibility page? If so please share them with us via comments.