Websites and HTML Practices

World Wide Web Considerations

The Web is rapidly becoming one of the most widely used media for delivery of distance education. The relatively low cost of delivery, ease of resource development and wide availability of student access make it an ideal instructional delivery resource. Although presently constrained by bandwidth considerations, the Web is fully capable of delivering a variety of multimedia and interactive instructional resources including audio, video and real-time chat services.

Access Issue

Students who are blind will be unable to access graphic images, text formatted in complex ways, Java applets and video clips. Students who are deaf or hard-of-hearing will not be able to hear the auditory content of the Web site. Some students with severe learning disabilities may be unable to process large amounts of text information without the use of assistive technologies. In addition, documents created using Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) are difficult, if not impossible, to read using screen readers and/or refreshable braille displays. Thus, if materials are provided on a website in PDF format, an alternative version should also be available in plain text or HTML format. Of course, this is only feasible for textual information and would not apply to materials, or portions of materials, that are inherently graphic in nature such as pictures, graphs and maps.

This video shares student’s experiences:

Remedies

A comprehensive set of guidelines for meeting the Web access needs of persons with disabilities have been developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) (http://www.w3.org/WAI/) as a working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Analysis:

The intent of these guidelines is to foster the creation of Web sites which provide equal access to information when viewed using typical, industry standard assistive computer technologies in wide use today by students with disabilities. Over the past two years, the international body of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has sponsored the work of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) in developing a set of international access guidelines for the Web. Although the WAI guidelines remain in draft format, they satisfy the access requirements identified under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In order to resolve compliance issues raised by OCR and to comply with Title II of the ADA, these guidelines have been adopted by the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. They apply to use of Web based instructional resources created by the college or other Web-based resources students are required to use for course completion. They will be reviewed/modified as necessitated by future revisions of the WAI guidelines by W3C.

The WAI guidelines excerpted below fall into three priority levels:

Priority 1

This guideline must be followed by an author, or one or more groups of users will find it impossible to access information in the document. Implementing this guideline is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use Web documents.

  • Provide alternative text for images, applets, and image maps.
  • Provide descriptions for important graphics, scripts, or applets if they are not fully described through alternative text or in the document’s content.
  • Provide textual equivalents for audio information (captioning).
  • Provide verbal descriptions of moving visual information in both auditory and text form.
  • Ensure that text and graphics are perceivable and understandable when viewed without color.
  • Ensure that moving, blinking, scrolling, or auto-updating objects or pages may be paused or frozen.
  • Ensure that pages using newer HTML features (i.e. style sheets, forms, tables) will transform gracefully into an accessible form.
  • Use features that enable activation of page elements via input devices other than a pointing device (e.g., via keyboard, voice, etc.).
  • For frames, provide sufficient information to determine the purpose of the frames and how they relate to each other. Ensure that tables (not used for layout) have necessary markup to be properly restructured or presented by accessible browsers and other user agents.
  • Only use technologies defined in a W3C specification and use them in an accessible manner. Where not possible, provide an accessible alternative page that does.

Priority 2

This guideline should be followed by an author, or one or more groups of users will find it difficult to access information in the document. Implementing this guideline will significantly improve access to Web documents.

  • Indicate structure with structural elements, and control presentation with presentation elements and style sheets.
  • Provide supplemental information needed to pronounce or interpret abbreviated or foreign text.
  • Elements that contain their own user interface should have accessibility built in.
  • Use interim accessibility solutions so that assistive technologies and older browsers will operate correctly.
  • Group controls, selections, and labels into semantic units.
  • Wherever possible, create good link phrases.

Priority 3

This guideline may be followed by an author to make it easier for one or more groups of users to access information in the document. Implementing this guideline will improve access to Web documents.

  • Provide mechanisms that facilitate navigation within your site.
  • Create a single downloadable file for documents that exist as a series of separate pages.

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