Today's Topic: Web Standards and Accessibility

Today’s discussion will be on web coding standards, which tend to generate almost as many religious battles as operating system choices.

We’ll cover the HTML standards development process, existing HTML and XHTML standards, problems with existing standards, and browser support for standards. We’ll also discuss the issues surrounding separation of presentation and content, and the importance of CSS in standards-based web development.

Closely related to the topic of standards and appropriate coding is the topic of web site accessibility. We’ll talk about different kinds of accessibility, the reasons for building accessible web sites, and some techniques for making sure sites are accessible to all users.

Readings on Web Standards and Accessibility

Standards

• 99.9% of Websites are Obsolete
• Better Living Through XHTML
• About the Web Standards Project
• Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE
• Why We Won’t Help You
• Semantic Obsolescence
• The Business Benefits of Web Standards

Accessibility

• Dive Into Accessibility (30 Days to a More Accessible Web Site)
• CNN Article on Web Accessibility

In-Class Exercise: Assessing Accessibility

1. Use Cynthia Says to evaluate at least two of your own web pages (with at least one of those being on your Grace account). If you don’t have a web page of your own, or if the server is not accepting URLs from rit.edu, review a page that you visit frequently. Make note of all of the priority 1, 2, and 3 problems identified.
2. If you reviewed your own web page, fix the Priority 1 problems. Remember that to pass the W3C recommendations, you must not have any Priority 1 problems. (You may find it helpful to use the WCAG checklist.)
3. After you’ve fixed your Priority 1 problems, look at the other comments in the report provided. Your efforts should now be directed towards fixing any Priority 2 problems. Finally, Priority 3 problems may also be fixed to provide maximum accommodations.

Post a comment to this entry that describes what problems you found on the site that you visited. If it was your own site, what level of accessibility were you able to achieve?

In-Class Exercise: Accessibility Simulations

1. Sign out a pair of headphones from the main computer lab (or use your own if you have some), and complete the tasks on WebAIM’s Screen Simulator.
2. Go to the Cognitive Simulator on the same site, and complete those tasks as well.
3. On the Vischeck site, provide a URL to a web page you’ve created, and see how it would appear to a person with color blindness. Try it with some of the web pages you frequent most often.

Files from CSS Exercise

Sorry for the delay. Here are the files (as a .zip archive) from the CSS exercise.