Structure is important.
A house wouldn’t be a house without structure - it’d be a pile of bricks and mortar, with some windows and doors.
Now, while you can’t have a house without structure, unfortunately, you can build a web page without any structure.
It’s not hugely useful though, so to help you make sure your pages are useful to your users, here’s our How To Do Headings guide.
One of the joys of doing the Better Connected accessibility assessments, is the chance they give us to see how much residents can do on their local council web sites now. Things are just so much easier for people who don’t find it easy to get down to the council offices, especially for quick tasks like paying bills.
So you can imagine how distressing it is when we have to fail a site because its online payment system won’t function without JavaScript.
Earlier this year, Bim wrote very eloquently on the subject of Too much accessibility: TITLE attributes, which, if you haven’t read it, or don’t remember what it says, is worth taking a couple of minutes to read over.
In the run up to the annual Better Connected survey, I thought it was worth a quick reminder of the issues, and a few top tips to help you make sure you’re not straying off the accessibility path.
One of the most common accessibility problems we find when conducting the Better Connected survey is the lack of marked up headers in data tables. So let’s look at why these are important, and how to make sure that tables can be clearly understood.
The first commandment of Web Accessibility is to Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element
. Unfortunately, this is more often easier said than done, with inappropriate alt text often being the cause of many sites failing to reach even Single-A. So here is our guide to best practice alt text.
Six months on from the publication of the Better Connected 2007 report, our thoughts begin to turn to this year’s survey.
So with that in mind, we thought it’d be a nice time to write a series of posts packed full of hints and tips, and pointing out the various issues we come across year after year.
If you’re a local authority web manager, this should give you enough time to make some changes before the survey starts.
If you’re not, then the advice is equally valid, and can be applied to any site.
