Katherine Lynch on Accessibility Tips for Websites

Katherine Lynch gives an overview of her presentation on Accessibility in Drupal 6 and Drupal 7: Contribute accessible modules and themes. Just as internationalization is abbreviated i18n, and localization is abbreviated l10n, accessibility is abbreviated as a11y.

Lynch provides some basic tips for how to bring your website up to the standards set forth by the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Section 508 law.

She also provides from tips for how to test your site through the open source screen reader called Thunder or the demo version of the most popular screen reader of JAWS. Lynch briefly describes how a screen reader will parse and communicate the content on a web page.

She also gives some other testing tips of verifying that you can still perform all of the actions and consume all of the same information after you turn off proprietary extensions like Flash and Silverlight, turn off JavaScript, turn off CSS, and then unplug your mouse.

Lynch also recommends using a couple of FireFox extensions of the Firefox Accessibility Extension and Fangs, which will help you verify the accessibility of your site. In her DrupalCon presentation slides, she also mentions VisCheck to see your site as a colorblind person would perceive it.

Finally, she provides some tips for how to create equivalent information to supplement rich media, and how HTML5 may help with accessibility in the future.