Today was the first day of the Inclusive New Media Design workshops – to quote the site:
Inclusive New Media Design is a research project which aims to identify the best ways to encourage web designers and developers to build websites accessible to people with intellectual disabilities.
just summing up a few points which should by now be standard practice (WCAG 1.0 discussion points from Simon Evans):
- do not use tables for layout – or forms (will not linearise well)
tables if used at all – should lineraise well, ie strippped of any formatting via CSS for example – the table should still make sense - create content that can be presented in different ways,
eg information, structure and relationships conveyed through presentation can be programatically determined and available through text - present page content in a meaningful sequence
whenthe sequence in which the content is presented affects its meaning – a correct reading sequence can be programatically determined - marking up forms for accessibility
- fieldset (grouping of form fields)
- legend (title for a group of form fields)
- label (title for a specific form input field)
one approach to forms (by Darren West):
using unordered lists for list of options such as gender and status input fields – the layout will degrade gracefully and maintain a meaningful and visually decent layout
a few useful links: