Accessibility
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A warm welcome to you. Before we go into the whole aspect of accessibility let me tell you a little bit about this site. As you have probably worked out, Hermish checks your web pages for accessibility issues. It also checks for superceded HTML content as well. If this is not enough Hermish has just released a new 'page display' checking tool. We wanted to call it a 'browser simulator' but that might get us into trouble. The page display tool allows you to remove stuff like style sheets and tables from your pages so that you can see what it might look like on other browsers. You can use the 'Browser compatibility' checking tool to find discover browser limitations.
Please also note that Hermish is under constant development, since it's release at the start of May '04 we have rooted out most of the major flaws. We would like to all the people who have helped us for their valued support and insight into accessibility.
Hermish is a free web accessibility tool designed to help you bring your web site up to required standards outlined by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). For an in-depth discussion of accessibility issues visit http://www.w3c.org/WAI/. Web accessibility guidelines in compliance to the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), a set of guidelines with different priority levels. The European Union suggests that websites have at least Priority level 1 accessibility. The United States have their own set of accessibility guidelines named Section 508, Hermish can check your document for Section 508 accessibility as well.
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Who is affected by accessibility?
There are many groups of people with disabilities, most will be affected by websites without accessibility in place.How web accessibility techniques help disabled people access the internet
Blind people and accessibility
IBM Homepage Reader is excellent for accessibility and a good example of an assistive technology for blind people. Known as a screen reader, this type of browser filters web pages for text and reads content accordingly thus increasing accessibility. Instead of showing images (photographs and graphics) screen readers rely on text equivalents such as the alt element within the img tag.
Visual difficulties and accessibility
People with accessibility difficulties reading standard sized text rely on the facility to enlarge text. This of course increases accessibility for people who may not always have their glasses with them.
Deaf people and accessibility
Although deaf people have less accessibility requirements and able to navigate web pages visually, audio dependant sites prove to be not accessible. Should your website use sound to function consider providing text equivalent pages to increase website accessibility.
Disabled and accessibility
Some sections of the community may have great difficulty with accessibility when using pointing devices such as a mouse. In this instance a web page should increase accessibility by providing the capability for using a keyboard to navigate.
Colour blindness and accessibility
Another accessibility issue is the inability to distinguish between specific colours. Therefore you may wish to rethink accessibility when deciding on what colours to use on a web page. One particular method to uphold visibility is to maintain a distinctive contrast of background and foreground colours. Black text and white background is far more visible than yellow text and orange background.
Before a web site can be deemed as accessible it must comply to guidelines under Priority 1 Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The site should comply to Priority 2 but as of yet is not paramount. Passing both levels 1 and 2 it could be made to comply with Priority 3. The greater the Priority levels the greater the accessibility.