Dreamweaver’s Approach To Website Accessibility
A website’s accessibility is a measure of how easy it is for visitors with different levels of motor, visual and auditory ability to make sense of the content on your web pages. If your website is accessible then people using screen readers, who prefer not to display images as they browse or who wish to increase the size at which text is displayed can all gain access to the information held in your pages.
There are a number of features within Dreamweaver which help web developers ensure that their pages are accessible. The program can be set up so that it will automatically offer you a series of accessibility options whenever you add an image, media element or form field to a page. There is also a built-in utility which you can use to check whether your pages contain elements which are not accessible.
The main settings in Dreamweaver are located by choosing Edit – Preferences. On the left of the Preferences screen there are a series of categories. In the General category, you should ensure that the option to use CSS instead of HTML tags is activated. Also, in the Accessibility category, you should switch on all of the checkboxes for displaying a dialog of relevant accessibility attributes for form object, media (Flash, video etc.) and form elements.
Activating the Use CSS tags options will mean that whenever you apply a formatting attribute (such as changing the colour of text) Dreamweaver will use CSS to implement the formatting. This makes the page more accessible by separating the page content from the presentation information. Activating the options in the accessibility section will cause the display of a dialog each time that you insert an image, media element or form field. The dialog will contain options for making sure that the element being inserted will be accessible.
Thus, whenever you add an image to a page, a dialog will appear prompting you for alternate (alt) text. This attribute makes images more accessible by providing a description of the images to users accessing the web with a slow connection as they wait for the image to load or who have disabled the display of images. The alt text will also be spoken by the screen readers commonly used by web surfers with impaired vision.
Dreamweaver will also prompt for the insertion of a link pointing to a long description of an image. This option should be used for complex images whose content cannot be adequately described in the brief alt text attribute. Examples of such images would be charts, diagrams, paintings or photos containing groups of people.
When the accessibility options relating to forms are active, Dreamweaver will display a dialog of options every time a form or form element is added to the page. The first set of options relates to the addition of the LABEL tag which serves to associate descriptive text labels with the form control to which they relate. The dialog also allows you to specify the order in which elements will be accessed by pressing the Tab key on the keyboard.
When a media element, such as a Flash movie, video or sound clip is inserted on a page, Dreamweaver will prompt the user to enter a title, access key and tab index. The title provides information regarding the media element in much the same way as alt text does for images. Access key offers users who find use of the mouse difficult an alternative method of accessing the media element using a keyboard shortcut. The tab index allows the creator of the page to specify the order in which elements on the page can be activated by using the Tab key.
Dreamweaver not only gives you help in making your page content accessible, it will also check your pages to see if they contain elements which are not accessible. To use the accessibility utility, click on the File menu then on Check Page and finally on Accessibility. The utility runs and then displays a list of elements on the page which are not accessible. If you double-click on any of the items in the list, the code representing it will be instantly highlighted allowing you to edit it.
Filed under: Web