style guide
Accessibility
“Accessible Text” is one of our mantras here at UsableType as you may know. The logic is this: what is the point of the web if you can't read what’s on it?
Accssibility means that the content of a site is available to everyone who visits. No one is left out because they don’t have the right browser, the right hardware, or the right internet connection. Furthermore it means that anyone with physical disabilites such as poor eye sight, deafness, or inhibited movement perhaps ruling out the use of a mouse, can also use the site successfully.
This style guide section is primarily concerned with promoting accessible text on the web. Okay, it’s concerned with trying to make your site look good; but the priority is to make your site accessible. The sections on Sizing Fonts, and Choosing Fonts address the ways we keep our text available to all. For example, we gave up trying to make sites look good in Netscape 4 (and earlier) browsers to ensure that the content is usable.
If you are building your sites using web standards, then you are taking a huge leap forward in making your sites accessible. You will find that you do not require a great deal more effort to comply with accessibility guidelines, because your standards compliant site is by its nature already very accessible. That’s one of the great things about developing with web standards.
So, this section in itself is not going to tell you too much about accessible text, because it is covered throughout the guide. All we want to do is provide a small check list of accessibility features you should be providing in your text.
Accessibilty Checklist
- Is your text resizable in all browsers?
- If links are not underlined is there another way of identifying links, not including color?
- Is your body text set to your users default text size? (we will be leniant with this one for the reasons discussed in Sizing Fonts)
- Do all images have alt text?
- Does image/flash replacement allow for users with non graphical or non css browsers?
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