Skills for Access

How we built the site

Throughout Skills for Access, we emphasise that accessible web and multimedia design is not simply an exercise in following step by step instructions, but requires awareness of the aims of the site in question and the target audience, and must also pay heed to the role of the site in a wider context. See the Skills for Access Philosophy for more details.

Accessibility is rarely a binary state - one can't describe a web site as "accessible" or "inaccessible". Accessible to whom? Accessibility of what, exactly? So subjective decisions are often required, as is an awareness of the need to continually improve and at the same time be aware of - and find ways of addressing - problems that may remain for people with specific access needs, despite best efforts.

As an example of this, we took notes during the development of this web site, so that we could make our reflections on development available to anyone who's interested. You may be wondering why we took certain decisions that we did - you may even disagree with some of the steps we took (sometimes we disagreed with each other!). We'd love to hear your thoughts.

HTML Standards

The need to ensure that pages validated to an HTML standard was seen as extremely important, to maximise cross-browser compatibility and forwards-compliance. We chose XHTML 1.0 Strict, thus making the information in our pages potentially available to future devices and applications that can do useful things with XML documents.

Be aware, though, that there is no consensus over whether HTML is 'better' than XHTML or vice versa! There has been (and is likely to continue to be) significant discussion on the use of XHTML versus HTML, and which particular version to use. Here are some viewpoints:

• Molly Holzschlag on HTML v XHTML
• Slashdot - HTML v XHTML
• Robert's Talk - Why XHTML?
• Sending XHTML as text/html considered harmful (Ian Hickson)
• XHTML is dead (Autistic Cuckoo)

While the relative merits and pitfalls of each are worth considering, the first and most important step is to choose a version of HTML or XHTML and make sure you validate as far as you can. And we recommend you read Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman for tips on creating web sites that do validate with standards. This book also has important advice on workarounds for those occasions where browsers misinterpret or fail to support standards.

Look and feel

When considering the site's visual appearance, we wanted to make sure that the site would be readable as it stood to a majority of visitors, and at the same time, if anyone needed to change any aspect of its appearance, then they could do so without losing the ability to read the site's content. We are aware that some accessibility-focused sites may not be noted for their aesthetic quality, so we hope that this site joins the growing list of web sites that not only follow best practice in accessibility and usability, but actually look good too (a subjective claim, we know!).

Cascading Style Sheets were used to provide the site's look and feel, and tables were not used for layout purposes. By using a print media style sheet, we've made sure that the site is accessible to printers - so when you print out a page, you get all the content you want to read!

Some sites provide style-sheet switching capabilities, allowing a clear and obvious way for users to adjust the appearance of the site - for example changing it to light text on a dark background - without having to fiddle around with their browser. We haven't done this, mainly because we felt (rightly or wrongly) that our target audience of e-learning and multimedia developers would be reasonably au-fait with their browser's capability of changing the page appearance. We're also encouraged by developments such as the Accessibar for Firefox, and, WebAdapt from IBM, both of which extend the browser's user interface to make display changing more obvious and reliable.

At the same time, though, we acknowledge that in some cases, providing an explicit means to allow a user to change the appearance of a web site may be of use. For a discussion on how this can be done, read Joe Clark on alternative style sheets on A List Apart

Navigation

While the site may seem complex, with many levels and categories of information, we have provided consistent navigation bars on every page, to help ease navigation:

• At the top of every page, a set of links giving access to pages about the site, including its accessibility and contact information;
• A site wide navigation bar, linking to index pages for each important section;
• A section-specific navigation bar, with links to all pages in a particular site section;
• Associated links on the right hand side of pages (these appear after the main content when the page is linearised) to other relevant Skills for Access resources, and related external web resources.
• Administrative links at the bottom of each page.

A skip to main content link appears at the top of every page, and we made the decision to make it visible so that sighted keyboard and alternative input device users can also benefit from the feature.

Links do not open in new browser windows, except for the following:

• Media clips
• HTML transcripts of video and audio clips

Links have been styled to change colour when followed, and navigation bar links change in appearance to reflect current page location, so you can see where you are in the site, and where you've been. We have also identified links to other web sites using a graphic. We know that recursive links (links to the same page) do exist, and we will closely monitor whether or not the presence of these lead to usability problems.