Designing Your Web Pages for Accessibility Introduction Your Web pages will be visited by people from all walks of life -- users from different countries, children and adults, and users with little knowledge of computers, as well as computer programmers and engineers. Your Web pages will also be visited by users with disabilities. Increasingly, new technologies have provided people with disabilities with unprecedented opportunities to access and use the World Wide Web. For example, people who are visually impaired can now enjoy Web sites by using programs called "screen readers," which provide a speech synthesizer that reads the text on the computer screen. Users with limited physical mobility can use a mouth stick, blow tube, or other device to navigate the Web, instead of using a mouse and a keyboard. The World Wide Web has become a highly graphical medium. Unfortunately, the large number of images and movies on the Web, with little or no accompanying text, make it difficult for some people to use Web pages. Just as it's important to design public buildings so that everyone can get inside and move around, it's important to design your Web pages so that more people can gain access to and use them. Some Basic Principles There are a few basic principles you can follow to make your pages more accessible: Give text descriptions for images. By providing text that describes the images on your Web pages, you will make your pages much more accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired, as well as to those who use text-only browsers or set their browsers not to display images so that they can surf the Web more quickly. To provide alternative text for images with Claris Home Page, follow these steps: Open Claris Home Page. Click to select an image and choose Show Object Editor from the Window menu. Alternatively, you can double-click the image. The Image Object Editor appears. In the Alt Label text box, type the text that you want to appear in place of the image. Click the window's close box to close the Image Object Editor. If your images are clickable links, make sure those links also appear somewhere in the text. Offer different ways to fill out forms. Offer alternatives to filling out online forms. Many people with limited mobility or visual impairments cannot use a mouse. Include an e-mail address as an alternative. Include descriptive text for audio and video files. If you use audio and video files, include text descriptions of the files for those who cannot hear the audio or see the video. Avoid using link names like "click here." Try to make link names descriptive. People who use screen readers may be hearing the link names read separately and out of context. If they hear something general like "click here," they won't know where the link will take them. For example, avoid using text like the following for a link: "Click this to find out about global warming." Instead, try this: "Learn more about global warming." If you use tables or other multicolumn formats, make the text available in some other form. Tables are a useful tool when you're designing a Web page and are widely used. However, screen readers read across adjacent columns of text, rather than down each column. This means that a visually impaired person will often hear the text read out of order. One way to make the tables in your site more easily understood by people who use screen readers is to provide alternate versions of your Web pages that don't contain tables. This page was constructed using a table. We have included an alternate version of this page that does not contain a table. Testing Your Site or Pages To help make your Web pages more accessible, you can visit a Web site called "Bobby." Bobby provides you with a detailed assessment of your Web site's accessibility. You will find Bobby most helpful if you are an intermediate to advanced Web page designer with HTML experience. Bobby performs a series of basic accessibility tests and gives some suggestions for improving your Web pages. To test pages already posted to a Web server, simply do the following: Go to the Bobby site. The address for this site is http://www.cast.org/bobby/. Type the URL of the first page you want to test. Click the Submit button. To test pages before you post them to your Web server, do the following: Save the pages in a folder. Go to the Bobby site. Click to select Advanced Options. Click the Browse button and select the page you want to test from the File dialog box. Bobby was developed by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to develop technology that improves learning for everyone, including those with disabilities. The site was licensed via Universal Learning Technology (ULT), a leader in providing universally accessible technology for learning. You can learn more about CAST and Bobby at the following Web site: http://www.cast.org.