Accessibility Statement

This is the official accessibility statement for doodlemonger.com. It borrows heavily from Michael Barrish’s accessibility statement, which is actually based on Mark Pilgrim’s accessibility statement. I'll let you complete the syllogism.

Access keys

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the site. On Windows, press ALT + an access key; on Macintosh, press Control + an access key.

Doodlemonger.com defines the following access keys:

  • Access key 1: Home
  • Access key 9: Contact Tyler Smith via Email
  • Access key 0: Accessibility Statement

Standards compliance

Pretty much every page on doodlemonger.com meets the following standards benchmarks:

  1. Validates as XHTML 1.0 and CSS2.
  2. Uses structured semantic markup. For example, H2 tags are used for individual post titles.

Navigation aids

  1. As appropriate, each page has rel=previous, next, and home links to aid navigation in text-only browsers and screen readers. Netscape 6, Mozilla, and Opera users can also take advantage of this feature by selecting the View menu, Show/Hide, Site Navigation Bar, Show Only As Needed (or Show Always).
  2. Access to all archives is available through the archive page. Additionally, links to the previous and next entries are provided after the body of each entry.

Links

  1. Many links have title attributes that describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article).
  2. Whenever possible, links are written to make sense when read out of context. Many browsers (such as JAWS, Home Page Reader, Lynx, and Opera) can extract the list of links on a page and allow the user to browse the list separately from the page.
  3. There are no javascript: pseudo-links. All links can be followed in any browser, even if scripting is turned off.
  4. There are no links that open new windows.

Images

  1. All content images include descriptive ALT attributes.
  2. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.

Visual design

Doodlemonger.com uses cascading style sheets for visual layout because tables are for data, not design.

  1. The doodlemonger.com stylesheet uses only relative font sizes, which are compatible with the user-specified “text size” option in visual browsers. So if you’re using, say, Internet Explorer, you can make your default text size larger under the View menu by selecting Text Size, Larger (or Largest).
  2. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets, the content of each page is still readable.
  3. Netscape 4 users get the no-stylesheet treatment by default. If you are still using Netscape 4, please, download a standards-compliant browser.

Accessibility references

  1. W3 accessibility guidelines explains the reasons behind each guideline.
  2. W3 accessibility techniques explains how to implement each guideline.
  3. W3 accessibility checklist is a busy developer’s guide to accessibility.
  4. U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.
  5. 30 days to a more accessible weblog is a fabulous tutorial by Mark Pilgrim which explains these guidelines and how to implement them.

Accessibility software and services

  1. Bobby, a free service to analyze web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines.
  2. HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.
  3. Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.
  4. JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited demo is available.
  5. Lynx, a free text-only web browser.

Related resources

  1. WebAIM, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving accessibility to online learning materials.
  2. Designing More Usable Web Sites, a large list of additional resources.