Categories
articles review

Response to 15+ Tips to Improve Web Accessibility

I gave feedback in the form of a comment for the article 15+ Tips to Improve Web Accessibility of a Website. But, yet again, my blog comment was not published. The article is not bad, just needed some clarifications. So since my comment wasn’t approved (after several days), here it is:

Great points, although 4 have to do with forms. Some clarifications:

  • For alternative text on images, decorative images should have empty value (alt=””) and linked images must have alt text describing target of link.
  • Relative sizing in CSS not as important as it used to be. [Most browser do page zoom by default and all browsers but IE can zoom text set in pixels.]
  • CSS vs table layout doesn’t have any direct impact to accessibility.
  • Use ABBR tag for acronyms as well as abbreviations (acronym tag is deprecated).
  • For skip links, see end of this article for JS fix for functionality on some browsers: http://terrillthompson.com/blog/161

And now that I think about it, the article overlooks pretty basic techniques such as data tables, captioning, and ARIA. For a more complete list of tips, see my 25 Ways To Make Your Website Accessible.

One reply on “Response to 15+ Tips to Improve Web Accessibility”

Comment from Martijn van der Ven via email [Thompson shows a solution in jQuery):

I just want to add that Thompson’s JS fix was not the end of the conversation – at all. Damon Muma blogged about the fix and had some ideas about it. In the comments of that blog post Paul Duffy and I tried to break away from jQuery and make an even more solid script for fixing skip links. Both are worth looking into. Duffy goes into more detail in his blog post ‘The Incredible Failing AccessKey’. The script I have published on GitHub is in the public domain and should be able to fix most skiplinks just by including it at the bottom of your site.

Just trying to keep the conversation going.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *