Accessible Websites - a "Win-Win" Situation

Why and how does using Web Standards help accessibility ?

Using standard HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) will mean your pages are more flexible in the way they can be presented to the end users.

Using standard HTML, CSS and W3C guidelines also ensures that your pages will work on the widest range of hardware and software - across different platforms and devices, making them accessible to more people.

Standard markup helps people who are using screen readers, e.g. the screen reading software can present all of the headings on the page as a list, providing a summary of the page contents for the users.
Pages using standard markup will work more consistently on a wider range of browsers and hardware. Any new browsers developed in the future, providing they conform to web standards, will be able to display or access such pages.
On pages that do not use standard markup, style sheets may not work as expected, so designing to standards is a real requirement.

Using CSS is now considered the preferred way to format page content because it helps to separate a page’s structural elements from the presentation code behind it. It’s quicker and easier to change the page display if the formatting and presentation instructions aren’t wrapped up inside the page’s HTML mark-up code.

Using CSS will also generally reduce the size of your markup, and thus speed up download times, while making web pages more accessible at the same time.

Among the main benefits of designing web sites with CSS are :

the HTML mark-up code becomes much simpler, and therefore smaller and more manageable
using relative measurements via style sheets means websites can be designed to look good on any monitor at any resolution
they provide more precise and predictable control over presentation and layout
the look and feel of a web site can be defined once, then the whole site can be changed quickly by changing just one file.
It is also possible to present multiple different views or ‘skins’ of the same site to cater for different user preferences, for example large fonts or high colour contrast.
people still using older browsers (or text only browsers) can still read your pages
people with disabilities have better access to your pages. (If you use CSS for presentation, users will be able to replace your style sheet with one of their own that encapsulates all of their preferences. This helps overcomes problems with, for example, fixed size FONT tags in mark-up and colour contrasts between text and page background.)

CSS is now widely implemented in many modern browsers, across many platforms (Windows, Linux, Apple Mac) including Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, and Konqueror. Because it is a W3C recommendation, it is highly likely to be implemented as a de facto standard by all future browsers.

In legal terms, evidence from court cases in countries with similar legislation to that of the UK suggests that the W3C Guidelines are also likely to be used as the primary way to measure accessibility of a website, so designing to W3C recommendations is desirable where accessibility is concerned.

Developing using Web Standards also allows us to Validate our web pages.

Why bother to Validate ?

Well, you would want to spell check and proof read a document before you put it on public display, wouldn’t you ?

Validation serves a similar purpose to spell checking and proofreading for grammar and syntax.

Just as texts in a natural language can include spelling or grammar errors, web pages using Markup languages may not follow their rules correctly, and so contain errors and deprecated (out of date) tags in their code.

Validation is one way to help with the Quality Assurance aspects of a website. As the W3C says :-

"A valid Web page is not necessarily a good web page [(the design may let it down)], but an invalid Web page has little or no chance of ever being a good web page." (Source :- FAQ for the W3C Markup Validator)

Validation helps with the practical issue that non-valid pages are (by definition) relying on error-correction by a web browser or some other ‘user agent’. This error correction can (and does) vary radically between the different web browsers, and even across different versions of the same browser.

Web designers have historically relied on the "quirks" of some browsers to achieve design and layout techniques on their sites, only to later suddenly find their pages displayed differently, or sometimes not at all.

This happened for pages designed for Netscape 1.1, which suddenly appeared totally blank when Netscape 2.0 was released. Internet Explorer has also had its fair share of problems and quirks, and while it initially set out to be bug-compatible with Netscape, it has moved more towards standards compliance in later releases.

If we are to avoid these types of problems in the future, then the only real way is for us all to adhere to standards for web development.

The W3C has a free Markup Validation Service that checks Web pages for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards, so the only excuse not to use it is bad practices on behalf of web developers themselves.

Next » Conclusion : accessible websites are a "Win-Win" situation

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