Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

The most common form of color deficiency, red-green color deficiency, affects approximately 8% of the population. Using ONLY colors such as these (especially to indicate required fields in a form) will make it more difficult for some visitors to your site to understand the meaning and messaging of your site. Depending on the sites construct it could create roadblocks in performing certain activities on your pages.

Give your links unique and descriptive names

Screen reader users often use a feature called a "Link List" to quickly pull up a listing of all links on a page. This dialog allows them to quickly get to a link that they are looking for on the page. For this reason you should try to provide unique and meaningful text to each of your links. Text like "Click Here" on a link should be avoided. Use language for your links that fully describes where the link is taking the user.

A more comprehensive tutorial on creating accessible web forms will be posted soon on the IT Accessibility site. A common mistake made on web forms is not properly labeling your form fields. The following guidelines should be considered when designing your forms:

ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is an easy and powerful technical specification for ensuring your site structure is accessible. By assigning ARIA roles and landmarks to web elements, you enhance the ability of screen reader users to navigate and interact with your content. ARIA roles and landmarks can be easily added to your HTML, in the same way that you add classes to HTML in order to load attributes from CSS. Consider the following: