Home » Web Development » A Few Words on Accessibility

There are a few things you can do in order to make your site accessible to people using alternative clients such as cell phones, PDAs and screen-readers (which are mostly for the blind, but could one day be used for cell phones or something else), and accessible to people who cannot use a computer normally (for example, people who have trouble using a mouse).

Keep in mind that these are just rules of thumb. There is more to accessibility than these rules, but they are a good start:

1. Always use structural markup (use CSS for layout, rather than tables).
2. Always specify alt=”" tags for any images on your page.
3. Use descriptive text for hyperlinks.
4. Avoid using frames if possible.
5. Don’t create flash-only sites.

A good test is to temporarily remove your style sheet file, and then load your page in a browser. Does it make sense when read start to finish?

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