[podcast]http://thinkingaccessible.com/podcasts/four_golden_rules_podcast_three.mp3[/podcast]
Transcript of the podcast:
[Intro music] Welcome to podcast three of Thinking Accessible. On today’s podcast, I will talk to you about my four golden rules for web accessibility.
Rule number 1:
Provide alternative text for non-textual content. What do it mean by this? Images are non-textual content. Audio and video are non-textual content. So for each of these elements you need to provide a text alternative. So for images in the HTML code you have to write an alternative tag to it. So in the tag of IMG for image you have to add ALT. for alternative text and here you would put basically a general idea of what the image represents.For audio feed, like for example this podcast, it would be nice to put a transcript of the audio because some people might not be able to hear it. And for video, you should put obviously captions for all the text (speech) in the video. Sure these are not easy to do, there are time consuming, but in the end it is good, for one, the person that cannot hear or see you media and also for search engines, because they will actually have the textual reference for these medias. So it’s a win, win situation.
Rule number 2:
Make it simple and consistent. Making your website simple will help people with cognitive impairments, elderly people and new web users that are not used to big and elaborate websites. Consistency is also important because if you have a lack of consistency your user might be confused, won’t know what’s going on with the website, might be lost. So we want to minimize this because if a user feels frustrated in your website, they are more likely to leave that website and go somewhere else. You can make your website simple by simply (sorry for this repetition) using normal vocabulary that anybody can understand. Do not be too verbose and just be clear with what you can to express. Consistency is to basically keep the same layout through out your website and you should be fine.
Rule number 3:
Colour contrast. In order to make your website legible it is important to consider colour. For example if you want to have a black background you shouldn’t really consider a colour for the text to be dark grey because this will be illegible for a lot of people. For me this rule is just for you to use common sense. I mean if you think that the colours you have chosen for the foreground and the background are not going to be legible or not easily legible by let’s say your grandmother, then don’t use them because it won’t be legible for a lot more people.
Rule number 4:
The last rule. Respect those HTML tags. Ok, so here it is. If it’s a <p> tag, then it’s a paragraph, then use it as a paragraph. If it’s a <table> tag, then use it as a table. Tables should (only) be used for tabular data, for example a data in a spreadsheet and not for layout, not for your page layout. (Use CSS instead!)
So those are my four golden rules for web accessibility. Yes, I know, there’s more to it than that, but for just a quick rundown of the essential ideas in web accessibility, these four simple rules are a major step forward.
[Exit music] Well that’s it for today’s podcast. That was podcast three for Thinking Accessible. My name is Rocío. Until next time!
Audio from ccMixter entitled “Café Connection“ by Morgantj under Creative Commons. 