Checking Your Site against Accessibility Guidelines

When your site is accessible, it recognizes visitors to your site who have disabilities or speak different languages. Although it's nearly impossible to accommodate 100 percent of your visitors, familiarizing yourself with accepted accessibility guidelines helps a lot.

Both the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the U.S. government have come up with guidelines. The W3C, a consortium of Web-savvy organizations and businesses, creates universal standards for Web content and design. The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) explain how to make Web sites understandable to the majority of Web visitors. These guidelines are mainly geared toward people with hearing, visual, or mobility challenges, but they effectively make Web sites more usable for everyone. The guidelines are divided into priorities:

• Priority 1: The most important guidelines to follow

• Priority 2: Still important but less so than Priority 1

• Priority 3: A good idea, but certainly not as important as the first two groups

The Access Board, an agency of the federal government of the United States, has also created accessibility standards specifically for Web sites (and other information technology resources) that are developed, used, or maintained by a U.S. federal agency. These standards fall under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1988.

Tip 

We recommend perusing the guidelines so that you can keep them in mind as you design your site. These documents are meaty, but a look-through can save you lots of time as you consider how to design your site. The WCAG is available at

http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/

For more about Section 508 standards, see

http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/summary.htm

Expression Web knows about both sets of accessibility standards, and can sift through your site to make sure it conforms to one or both sets. After Expression Web has scanned your Web site, it then proposes design changes based on what it finds.

To check your Web site against accessibility standards, do this:

1. With a Web site open, choose Tools Accessibility Reports.

   The Accessibility Checker dialog box appears.

2. In the Check Where section of the dialog box, select the radio button next to the group of pages that you want Expression Web to check.

   You can check the entire site in one pass, or you can select specific pages.

3. In the Check For section of the dialog box, select the check boxes next to the accessibility standards you want to use.

   We suggest checking all three, for good measure.

4. In the Show section of the dialog box, select the check boxes next to the types of information that you want to appear in the report.

   You can check for these types of information:

   • Errors: Select this check box if you want the report to show items that are considered errors according to the accessibility standards you're using.

   • Warnings: Select this check box if you want the report to include items that may not technically be errors but may need to be adjusted according to the standards.

   • Manual checklist: If you select this check box, you can check your pages manually against the accessibility guidelines. Expression Web includes items on the report that are proverbial red flags for accessibility-but which you may have handled correctly already-such as a link in a page to an external style sheet. The accessibility guidelines state that the content of a page should be readable without the style sheet attached (as shown in Figure 12-1). Most likely, you already took care of that.

     
     Figure 12-1: Suggestions and changes based on accessibility guidelines.

5. Click the Check button.

   Expression Web checks the selected documents against the accessibility standards you chose and opens the Accessibility task pane (refer to Figure 12-1) below the editing window.

Each problem is identified by page name and by line number, which refers to the page's HTML. (You can see the HTML line numbers by looking inside the document's Code view, which we talk about in Chapter 14.)

To read the specific guideline that pertains to the problem, click the link in the Checkpoint column. This action opens a Web browser, showing the exact guideline in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines document so that you can read it and decide whether you need to make any changes.

To save the results of the Accessibility Checker, in the Accessibility task pane, click the Generate HTML Report button. After the dialog box closes, a new page is visible in Expression Web. Save the report just as you save any other Web page. (We show you how in Chapter 2.)

The Accessibility Report lists the filenames of the documents that Expression Web checked, along with a description of each potential problem. Some of these descriptions point out problems with the HTML code and others propose easy content or formatting changes. Make whatever changes you can, and then generate the report again to see how your site checks out.

Tip 

If an issue continues to pop up and you don't know how to fix it, you may want to post your question on an online user group. To find the Microsoft Expression Web public newsgroup, go to the main Microsoft Expression Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/expression-web/default.mspx. Then, in the Knowledge Center area, click the Join a Discussion link.