Making your online resources accessible

Provide metadata. Labelling resources with relevant vocabulary or accessibility features makes it easier for the user to find relevant and accessible information.

Use responsive web design, which allows the content to adapt to the end users’ output device.

Create your website according to the User Centered Design (UCD) guidelines.

Provide a site map. Give users a sense of where they are within your website.

Use navigation mechanisms consistently.

Provide a breadcrumb to determine where users are (navigation).

Allow links and headings to be navigated using the Tab key. Provide keyboard shortcuts to important links.

Provide ways to help users to find content. Include a search feature on each page.

Offer a logical order of links and headers for users to navigate.

Divide your information into manageable blocks.

Use style sheets to control layout and presentation. Organise your documents so they may be read without style sheets.

Create a style of presentation that is consistent across pages. Give each page a structure by using predefined headings. Your headings should follow a logical order.

Include alternative text descriptions (alt text) for images.

Check colour contrast with free tools.

Allow all page functionalities to be device independent, meaning they can be used through a keyboard or voice control for example.

Ensure that moving, blinking, scrolling or auto-updating objects or pages can be paused or stopped.

Ensure the keyboard focus is not lost when a page refreshes.

Include a Skip Navigation feature on each page.

Separate information and structure from presentation to enable different presentations.

Use a semantic structure for title, heading, quotations, block quote emphasis, list.

Group related links, identify the group (for user agents), and, until user agents do so, provide a way to bypass the group.

For data tables that have two or more logical levels of row or column headers, use markup to associate data cells and header cells.

Ensure that equivalents for dynamic content are updated when the dynamic content changes.

Check your web pages for accessibility issues using a three-step process:

• Manual check.

• Automated check using free resources provided below.

Test by trusted users of assistive technology, like screen readers, screen enlargement software and voice-input dictation.

Test your pages in a speech browser.