Cynthia Says... Create Accessible Web Sites

Kynn writes "The folks at ICDRI, in partnership with the Internet society and HiSoftware, bring us Cynthia Says, a free service to help you evaluate your Web pages for accessibility. In other words, it's roughly equivalent to what Bobby used to be, before it went commercial. It features what seems to be a cartoon version of my friend Cynthia Waddell, which is a bit creepy, but in all honesty it's a much better symbol than the old cartoon cop used with Bobby. I always thought there was an implied menace, as if the smiling chap would happily bludgeon you with his truncheon if you created an inaccessible Web site." If only.

Comments

Yet another Web Accessibility article

[BornInASmallTown]

I really hate to sound insensitive on this topic, but I'm tired of reading articles about web accessibility when it almost always boils down to one thing:

Don't forget to use ALT tags!

Ok, ok, so there's more to it than that. However, in my designs, I've begun to apply the following rule of thumb in regards to web accessibility:

The page is accessible if it can be properly viewed and navigated using a text-based browser (i.e. Lynx).

Lynx forces the page creator to use ALT tags liberally, and it reduces or eliminates the page's dependency on things like Javascript and Flash.

What else, really, has to be considered outside of the limitations of a text-based browser? I'd love to read some comments from folks with more expertise in this area.

Re:Yet another Web Accessibility article

[Toy G]

The problem is, it's not a matter of just allowing "text-only" browsers to correctly display your page; your pages should "make sense" from a semantical point of view, thus allowing semantic interpreters (such as browsers for blind persons and so on) to easily and correctly parse them. e.g. put the "title" attribute in your anchors, consider accesskeys, validate your xhtml, etc etc.

For further things, take a look at Dive Into Accessibility, a really good book.