Besides keeping your web site focused, it is also import to consider accessibility. Some of the people who visit your web site will be suing different monitors that yours or running it at a different resolution. More importantly, however, some users will have poor eyesight or even completely blind. How do you ensure that your web site is user-friendly to people with these limitations?

You might need to make some changes to the way you code your site to sthat you don’t alientat this group of users. It is possible that they may be using a screen reader which reads the words out loud. Some screen readers are more advanced than others but in all cases you should do your part to help your web visitor. Stick to the guidelines given here as well as clean HTML and CSS and your web site should be more accessible.

Navigation

This is one of the most challenging aspects of your web site to your users with disabilities. If you use Flash or JavaScript for your navigation bar, screen readers may ot be able to interpret the links. An easy alternative is to use CSS.

Users may also want to increase font size or remove the display of images (text-only) to make your web pages easier to read. If you use images for your navigation but any text embedded with them will not be able to be read by the screen reader.  The easiest way to fix this is to always use the <alt> tag for every image. For example if you designate a little house icon for your home page or even have the word “home” embedded in the button so it is no longer text, the screen reader can’t “see” it. If, however, the tag for you image is <img alt=”link to home page” …> the screen reader can describe the image to the user with disabilities. Also when images are turned off in the browser the alternate text will be displayed.

Also be careful in using tables in your page design. Screen readers often have difficulty understanding them. Tables can be made accessible by keeping them simple and not using empty cells.

Hyperlinks

You can also provide short cuts to navigate your site by including the accesskey attribute in your links. For example, <a href=http://capproservices.com/ accesskey=”H”> lets the user press Alt or Ctrl plus H to follow the link to your home page. Don’t try to do this for all of your links — just for the main navigation bar. JAWS, the most popular screen reader, can read Accesskeys aloud allowing users to access pages more quickly.

Another attribute to add to links is <title>. This will indicate to the user the destination of the link.

Using the right colors is also important for navigation. There are many people who are color blind. Tools such as http://colorfilter.wickline.org will simulate how your web site pages appear to someone who is color blind.

There are also tools to help you check to be sure your web site adheress to the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI):

• Accessibility check
• Accessibility Tools

Navigation is crucial

The components that make up the navigational structure of a web site are known as navigational elements. The first thing to consider is your domain or company name. If your company name is well branded, potential visitors may enter it into their browser’s address bar or a search engine. So although your name isn’t normally considered a navigational element, it becomes one when used to locate your web site. If this is a possibility for your site, keep your web site name short, don’t use punctuation or unusual spelling. You should also keep your subfolder names short, too, and for best search engine rankings, use keywords.

Usability studies show that a visitor’s path through a site frequently takes him back to the home page. Some visitors will start here but many may arrive at a page deep within your site. As they browse this page, if they find what they were searching for they may click on other links on that page. If they want to check out the site as a whole, they will want to start at the “beginning” which for web sites is the home page. For this reason, it is important to have a link to your home page on every page of your web site. This conventional navigational element is usually found on multiple locations. The usual locations for these links are: (1) the upper left, usually a graphical link; (2) in a text link at the bottom of the page, usually part of a horizontal menu bar; and (3) sometimes as part of a breadcrumb trail.

Links

During the infancy of the World Wide Web, pages were displayed in 16 or less colors, using mostly text and sometimes including very simple graphical images. Users expected all links to be blue underlined text, like this. Today, web designers have done all kinds of tortuous things to links: like this (click on “this” to see where it takes you), or this or even this. (For this last one, it is a white text with a red background, a black-dotted border and it BLINKS! You won’t see the blinking in all browsers, e.g., Internet Explorer.)

There’s nothing wrong with having distinctive links for your web site as long as your visitor can easily find them! Make sure they are in a different color from standard text. If a visitor looks at your web site and can’t immediately tell where all the links are, they won’t like it and won’t stick around very long.