Keep your website legal and accessible to all [BT broadband office]

Keep your website legal and accessible to all

Posted 28 May 2008 at 8:35AM by Hannah Gilchrist in Website development

Here are our top tips to staying within the law without a complete redesign...

Change the font
Disabled consumers have an annual combined spending power of £80 billion so simply adjusting the size and type of your fonts can open your business to a whole new market. As a general rule sans-serif fonts are preferred.

Adjust your colour contrast
Most web users struggle with varying types of colour contrasts. Stear clear of white text on a black background as this is notoriously difficult to read.

Check your links or attachments
Using PDF downloads for forms and maps is a great way of leaving space for the more important things on your site, however it's important to check each attachment can be read by a screen reader.

Tag your images and animations
Images and animations are great ways of making a website more lively and interactive, however it's important to note what relationship your images have with the text on the page. If they are unnecessary, remove them, if not use a tag to describe the function of each visual

Check hypertext links
Try to use text that makes sense when read out of context. For example, additions like 'click here' or 'apply here' won't be any help for those using screen readers.

And if you've not got a website for your company yet, why not set-up a Tradespace for free!

Tags: accessibility, bt, bt broadbandoffice

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Comments

1. At May 28, 2008 8:03 PM, keith wrote:

thanks for those few tips i will be using them it did not even occur to me some disabled people veiwed sites in this way thanx the fishman.

2. At May 29, 2008 11:40 AM, Thomas Grewar wrote:

This advice is good for buisness for starting up, and for those wanting to make sure that their site is industry standard.

Maybe BT Should take on board some of the advice they said in this artice maybe? I have used a screen reader, as a test, and it found this very article / site extreemly difficult to read. Double Standards maybe?

- Thomas Grewar

BT broadband office