Accessibility Guidelines

[Guest PD1]

Hi all, I am new to the forum. I have been creating simple websites in Dreamweaver for a few years now and having just graduated from University I hope to do it on a more professional basis.I have been reading a lot about the new accessibility guidelines and the new laws that came into force concerning screen reader access etc. I was just wondering if anybody could clarify these for me? Also how can you get the website accepted by the W3C and all the different bodies?I have turned on the accessibility checker in Dreamweaver, but find the instructions if some is incorrect impossible to understand...Can anybody shed some light on the subject. Having started to teach/mentor students with a disability I am beginning to realise how big an area disability web access is becoming. Many thanks

[boen_robot]

Dreamwaver is either a WYSIWYG editor or a code editor.For WYSIWYGers, there isn't much dreamwaver can do. Simply because the price to do those things automatically is extra code that makes the page unaccessable.For coders, there isn't much accessability help that could be done either. Unlike validation, there are acessability guidelines that are simply impossible to verify automatically.The better way is to simply validate your XHTML code, validate your CSS code and eliminate all errors that appear. Fixing the warnings is a plus, but optional. After that, read and follow the WCAG list as much as you can.In one sentence, I can say "Use XHTML elements for what they define, not for how they look and use CSS to manage the look instead" or "Use semantical markup" in short. In other words:

• Don't use tables for layout! That's probably the biggest pill to slallow.
• Use lists for a list of items. Most notably, for your navigation.
• Do not use headings only because the text shown is bigger. Use CSS if you want to make some text bigger.
• Use different headings depending on how deep is the text you're putting the heading on. Use CSS if you want to make inner headings as big as h1 (or larger).
• Use <div> for devisions of your page, <p> for blocks of text, <span> for inline text that needs different style.
• Use <strong> instead of <b>, <i> or <u>. Screen readers pronounce this tag differently then normal text, unlike the other three.
• You can tweak the settings for screen readers with Aural styles if you need more effects then a simple <strong>.

[reportingsjr]

Hi boen, I was just wondering how exactly to do this. I tried<style type="text/css">h1, h2, h3, h4:hover{voice-family: male;richness: 80;cue-before: url("beep.au")}</style><h1>Hello</h1>And when I hovered hello it didnt do anything (my sound works). What do you need to do for this to say the word?

[boen_robot]

Hi boen, I was just wondering how exactly to do this. I tried<style type="text/css">h1, h2, h3, h4:hover{voice-family: male;richness: 80;cue-before: url("beep.au")}</style><h1>Hello</h1>And when I hovered hello it didnt do anything (my sound works). What do you need to do for this to say the word?

You have applyed the :hover only on h4. In order to make it work on all headings, you must use:

h1:hover, h2:hover, h3:hover, h4:hover

as a selector instead.P.S. You do realize that any :hover visual (I don't know about aural) effects on headings are not going to work in IE6, right?