Tips for making your page ADA compliable

 There are several easy modifications you can make to your website to ensure that it will still be accessible to people with various disabilities.

• One easy change to make is to provide alternate text for all of your images and other appropriate media.  It will help those who are color blind, and those who have text-only browsers for various reasons.  An alternative text for an image (or text equivalent) describes the function or purpose of image. A text equivalent should not describe visual appearance or how something sounds. For example, if an image of a magnifying glass is used for a search button, the alt-text would be "Search" rather than "Magnifying glass".    To give an image alternate text in Microsoft Frontpage Editor, right click on the image and go to image properties where you can enter your alternate text in the appropriate field.
  

• For information on what color schemes are easily readable by the color blind, visit the page for Colour Blind Design Hints and Tips
  

• Staying away from text that is too small can aid those who view your page and are visually impaired.
  

• Another helpful design practice is to create a style of presentation that is consistent across pages.  A consistent style of presentation on each page allows users to easily find navigation buttons between pages, as well as find the primary content for each page. While this helps make it easier for everyone, it especially benefits people with learning and reading disabilities. Making it easy to predict where the needed information is found on each page will increase the likelihood that it will be found. Examples of structures that may appear at the same place between pages:

1. Navigation bars 

2. The primary content of a page 

3. Advertising 
   

• Although most computer users these days are relatively proficient at using the mouse, some people still have trouble clicking on option buttons and check boxes. To make these--and other--form fields easier to work with, you can make their labels "clickable" in FrontPage. When you do so, clicking the label in front of a field will have the same effect as clicking on the field itself. (Clickable labels only work in version 4 and later of Internet Explorer; other browsers simply show the labels as ordinary text.) To make a label clickable in FrontPage, select both the label and the form field. Then, choose Insert | Form Field | Label.  FrontPage adds a dotted-line border around the label to show that it's clickable.    
  

• There are several other more complex and advanced techniques to ensure your webpage will be accessible to everyone, which you can find out about at W3C's Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 page

Below are more resource pages dealing with accessability issues:

• WebABLE! is the authoritative Web site for disability-related internet resources. 

• Designing More Usable Web Sites 

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

• Colour Blind Design by Andrew Oakley.

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		Kate Akers  akersk@missouri.edu Last revised: 12/12/06