How to Make a Website Handicap Accessible

Go to your favorite website and try to navigate it with your eyes closed or without using your mouse, and you'll have a sense of the difficulties facing people with accessibility issues. These are the basic tests for a website's accessibility. Making a website handicap accessible is easy as long as you keep the following steps in mind.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

1. Write out all important text, rather than (or in addition to) using scripts, applets, plug-ins or images.
2. Include alternative text for all images, scripts, applets and plug-ins. Use an "alt attribute" to make a message visible to screen-reading machines for the blind. For example, if you have an image of a smiley face, write the tag like this:
3. Title your links with informative phrases such as "Next page" rather than simply "click here." Because screen readers can scan only the links on a web page, every link should make sense out of context.
4. Structure the navigation of your website similarly on each page.
5. Provide headings for your tables and name your pages and frames so they are descriptive of their content.
6. Put your buttons and fields in a logical order. For example, put a "Last Name" field directly after a "First Name" field so that the user can tab across the fields in an order that makes sense.
7. Add the element for all input fields. For example: First name: