Designing Accessible Websites

Web Accessibility Checklist

How do I make my web site accessible?

The UT Tyler template is designed for accessibility. When updating content, use the "Accessibility Check" tool under "Final Check" to assure your pages are accessible.

More Information:

1) Validate Your HTML and CSS

Assistive technology relies on valid html, so make sure you start with clean html.

• W3C's (x)HTML Validator
• W3C's CSS Validator

2) Design Your Site with Accessibility in Mind

As Dr. John Slatin always said, "Good design, is accessible design." Make sure as you begin your design process at least one person on your design team understands the principles and techniques of making a web site accessible. Consider accessibility and usability from the very beginning of your project. Designing for a defined audience and with known parameters leads to quality results. And while retro-fitting accessibility into a web site is always possible, it isn't the recommend course of action.

Consider all of the official categories of disability in your design:

• Cognitive Learning
• Auditory
• Visual (including blind, low vision, and color blind)
• Motor/Physical
• Speech

A text equivalent for every non-text element must be provided. This includes: images, graphical representations of text, animations, frames, scripts, spacers, images used as list bullets, video, graphic buttons. the equivalent text information must serve the same purpose as the visual or auditory content.

3) Use Accessibility Web Development Tools

UT Tyler uses the Content Management System, OU Campus. OU Campus has tools built into the system to test for accessibility.

Rich Media

• Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Accessibility
• Adobe Flash Accessibility
• National Center for Accessible Media including MAGpie
• Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange (SAMI)
• Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL)

4) Test Your Site's Accessibility

• Choose any of the following tools/techniques to test the accessibility of your site.
• Within OU Campus, you can test for accessibility when publishing your page.

Testing Tools - automatically check for 508 compliance, as much as possible. 

PDF Accessibility Checker

Page by Page Free Testing Tools

• AChecker
• WAVE
• Web Developer Extension

Enterprise Wide Testing Tools

• Worldspace by Deque (enterprise version)
• Rational Policy Tester by IBM
• HiSoftware

Assistive Technology - An important part of accessibility testing is attempting to use your own site with assistive technology. Download a demo version and see if you can navigate your website.

• JAWS for Windows by Freedom Scientific