Accessibility: The Standard for Good

Have you ever tried surfing the Web without relying on your hands or fingers to navigate the sea of information?

How about blindly tunneling through the depths of the Internet and relying on a computer program called a screen-reader to read every piece of text displayed on a website aloud?

And when is the last time you visited YouTube and streamed your favorite video – with the sound off?

Although these tasks – and even the thought of these tasks – may be irrelevant to a “normal” person’s everyday Web experience, people with disabilities are faced with a daily struggle to interact with a Web that caters to a world without encumbrances.

To combat this struggle, many governments around the world – including the United States – passed laws that require any person or business with a website to follow guidelines in order to make the technology accessible to people with disabilities. These policies – though more stringent in some countries than others – strive to promote the ultimate goal of the Internet: the universal availability of information to everyone.

Even though these laws encourage Web developers and business owners to adhere to standards of accessibility, they often are overlooked.

Most of us get lost in a Web that is drenched with data and hyperlinks and that is powered by loyal patrons who love to skim, share and soak up real-time information. In 2009, an Internet monitoring company, Netcraft, released figures that reveal the Web contains more than 215 million websites with registered domain names, and that display some sort of content. That was a year ago.

With our real-time addiction and these overwhelming figures for content-driven websites, how can we possibly police every website for thorough accessibility compliance?

Sadly, we can’t.

But we can make sure that if we have any influence over the creation of or the maintenance of any type of Web presence, we must strive to advocate accessibility standards as best we can.

Here are a few best practices to promote the greater good of accessibility standards:

► Closed captions for videos – On Oct. 8, President Obama signed an accessibility law that requires any video displayed on the Internet to have a closed captioning option. Sites such as Hulu and YouTube are embracing this standard, offering closed captioning on numerous videos throughout their sites.

► Alt text for images – For those not familiar with website design code HTML, the element image – the code used to post an image to a webpage – contains a tag within the element called “alt,” which means alternative text.

The original purpose of the “alt” tag was to provide a textual summary of an image that will replace the image if an image does not load.

The alt tag now is used by the blind and by anyone else using a screen-reader, which reads the text within these “alt” tags in order give information about the images that are displayed on a page.

► Do not trap users in content – For those users using a keyboard or voice command software to maneuver through a site, it is good practice not to rope someone into the content of an external plug-in.

For example, when a user is tabbing through the content of a website, he or she may have to tab through an external plug-in in order to reach the bottom of a webpage and may have to go through the plug-in in order to reach his or her final destination.

Some plug-ins are built to restrict access to content within the plug-in; therefore trapping a user in the mini application. To avoid this, install plug-ins that do not promote this inaccessible behavior.

For more accessibility standards, visit the Techniques and Failures for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 provided by the World Wide Web Consortium.