Accessibility at a glance...

The accessibility movement encourages web sites to be built to allow people with disabilities to view them. For example, one accessibility standard is that all images have "alternate text" and "long descriptions" coded into the HTML. This would be useful for software that reads web pages out loud for blind people. Even if they cannot see your images, the software can read the description of the image out loud.

There are two different guidelines often used when determining whether a site is "accessible": the US Government Section 508 Guidelines and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

This template was built to meet as many of those standards as possible. It meets all the Priority 1 standards of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and all of the Section 508 Guidelines. If you are concerned with accessibility, you will need to take responsibility to label all your tables and images and to avoid technologies or scripting that may not be accessible.

Some of the many ways that this template meets standards:

• Table structure
  • Tables are built using relative sizing so that the page will resize to fit browser windows.
  • All tables have a "summary" statement that describes what the table is being used for.
• Cascading Style Sheets
  • Table background colors/patterns and bullet images are defined using Cascading Style Sheets within the theme (instead of hard-coding them, which FrontPage will do when themes are applied without CSS).
  • Font colors and sizes are also defined with CSS, which allows the page to degrade functionally even if someone does not have CSS viewing capability.
• Images
  • Images within the page layout have "alt" set in the HTML.

Some of the ways that this template is not able to meet standards:

Please note that these are "Priority 2 and 3" checkpoints and that most of them are FrontPage Theme-related.

• FrontPage Theme Issues
  • When you apply your theme so that the navigation bars have "Active Graphics" (i.e., change on rollover), you will automatically break some standards. FrontPage automatically generates scripting and code to make the rollover effect and you will have no control over it.
  • When you use image buttons, you will automatically break one of the standards that suggests a "spacer" (image or text) between navigation links.

How to develop your site so it's accessible:

• As you insert your own graphics, be sure to add the "alt" tag. You can easily do this in FrontPage by right-clicking on the image and selecting "Image Properties." Click the "General" tab and type in your textual description in the "Text" field.
• If you insert tables, go into the HTML and find the line of code that looks like:
  <TABLE BORDER="0" ...>.
  Add the "SUMMARY" attribute and briefly describe what the table is for. For example:
  <TABLE BORDER="0" WIDTH="100%" SUMMARY="Rental Rates for August 2002">

There are many other issues that you may need to address when it comes to accessibility. Here are some links to sites you may find helpful:

• W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
• Section 508: Government Guidelines
• IBM's Accessibility Center
• Test your site using Bobby