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Web & SEO Courses

Accessibility Fundamentals

Overview

Website accessibility has become a major issue for web designers and developers. Websites designed without taking accessibility into consideration exclude certain sectors of the population and limit your customer base. This course will enable you to ensure your site conforms to the WAI (W3C) Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Prerequisites

Working knowledge of HTML and or a development platform e.g. Dreamweaver.

Course Content

General concepts and techniques

Why make your site accessible?
Analysis: what makes a site inaccessible?
Up to date standards and technologies
Browser and platform compatibility

Legal issues

Case studies
Legal requirements

Coding for accessibility

Developer tools
Doctypes: XHTML v HTML
Deprecated elements
Writing efficient and meaningful HTML

Building pages with CSS

Separating content from presentation
The cascade, inheritance, specifity
Fonts, colours and other properties
Non-tabled page layouts
Using lists for navigation
Columns and other layout techniques
Styles for print

Navigation

Clear navigation structures
Link titles - identifying link content
Specifying keyboard shortcuts for links
Using the tab key for navigation
Adding a ‘Skip Navigation’ option
Building a Site Map

Validation

WAI guidelines
UK Government guidelines
Bobby, Web Exact and other resources
Manual checks – Accessibility checklist

Assistive technologies

Screen readers
Braille displays

Text

Specifying language and encoding
Scalability – ensuring readable text
Acronyms and abbreviations

Images

Alt tags – providing alternative content
Using background images – text replacement
Animated gifs

Tables

Using headers and titles for data tables
When to avoid tables

Forms

Associating labels with form elements
Building in keyboard access for forms

Accessible design

Building for usability
Fluid vs fixed design – allowing for scalability
Colour schemes – contrasting colours
Using alternatives to colour for mark-up

Multimedia & scripting

Working with Flash, video or audio content – providing alternatives
Issues with JavaScript and other browser scripting languages
Mouse events – providing keyboard based alternatives

Other Relevant Courses

Duration

2 Days

Schedule

18/19 September 2008

Prices

£645

All the bookings come with lunch, refreshments, course notes and post training support.

Dates

This course can be run at Harlequin Training and at your site.