6 Simple Tricks to Make Your Page More Accessible (WAI, WCAG)
Screen readers are really cool pieces of software, but as a web-developer you should help the screen reader to handle your webpages better for the blind users. Besides you add more text content to your pages, and search engines loves text content.
Here some really simple tricks:
<map title=”My favorite links”>
The <map> tag is not only for imagemaps, you should use it to group link-lists. In the title-attribute you have to write a description for the elements within the map. Screen readers can now readout the description, so blind people can decide if they want hear the list.
<abbr title=”What the fuck”>WTF</abbr>
With the <abbr> tag you can markup abbreviations for screen readers, maybe search engines can use this additional data too.
WCAG Techniques – Abbreviations
<hr />
Use the oldschool horizontal ruler for your document structure, you can style it with css or hide it from non-blind users. Screen readers use it to tell users if there is a new content block.
Skip Links
With a “Skip to content”-Link, blind users can fast jump to the main content section. If you don’t provide such links screen readers must read always the main/sub-menu of your pages. You can hide the skip-links with css.
accesskey=”9″
Provide access key attribute, so blind users can faster navigate through your pages. You should add an access key to every main-menu point.
Tags: CSS, HTML, templating, wai, wcag