Take Baby Steps Towards Accessibility (Part 2)
Author of this post: Tara MacKay | About Blog Authors »Yesterday, I gave you some advice on making your site more accessible. Today, I’m going to help you wrap things up.
Do the easy things first. Review your highlighted list, and perform the simplest tasks that don’t affect your design. Don’t worry about priority levels just yet. Many of the most basic modifications–like replacing your deprecated HTML tags with new ones, or adding alt attributes to your image tags–are nothing more than markup changes. Even many content-related alterations, like the transcription of video features, are simple and won’t disturb your design. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you can make your site more accessible.
Use an accessibility checker. There are free and paid services online that will review your pages and then tell you which accessibility guidelines you have yet to satisfy. Now why didn’t I mention this sooner? Because I think it’s much easier to make the simple changes before using a checker. If you don’t make these changes before using a checker, the checker will return an insufferably long list of things to do, perhaps souring you on to this whole idea of accessibility. These sites offer free accessibility assessments: ContentQuality and Webxact Watchfire.
The HiSoftware Cynthia Says checker at contentquality.com checks for Section 508 and all three WCAG priority levels.
Focus on Priority 1 improvements. Now that you’ve got the easy bits wrapped up and have viewed your results in a checker, focus solely on the Priority 1 issues that remain. Use the techniques explained on the WCAG site if you’re not sure how to satisfy a specific requirement. Take your time, and make sure you do things properly. Once you’ve completed a task, test the result in your favorite accessibility checker before moving on to the next item.
If you follow these steps, your site should end up fully accessible. You can then decide which Priority 2 and 3 checkpoints are right for your site and audience. By taking “baby steps,” you’re can gradually adapt your design and markup, instead of making sweeping changes. Granted, there’s something to be said for the all-at-once method, but unless you’re starting a new project from scratch, it probably isn’t practical in the usually hectic web design environment. In the end, as long as you have welcomed more users to your site and allowed them to experience your content, you’ve done a good thing.
