Accessibility Notes
For me, real accessibility is a very broad-ranging topic. There are many groups of users who should be considered:
- Users of different computer screen browsers
- Users who cannot see images (blind users, users with images switched off in visual browsers)
- Users who have JavaScript switched off (visual browsers)
- Colourblind users (visual browsers)
- Users with poor eyesight (visual browsers)
- Users who find it difficult to use a mouse (mobility-impaired users, new computer users)
- Users who find it difficult to use a keyboard
- Dyslexic users
- Users with epilepsy
- Non-native speakers
- Users with low-level literacy
- Users from another culture and /or in another country
- Users who cannot hear sound content (deaf users, users with no sound facility on the computer)
- Users of other visual media (terminals, small screens such as PDAs and WAP phones, TV screens, printed pages)
- Users of non-visual media (screen readers [aural browsers], braille tactile devices, braille printers)
The HTML 4.01 spec includes a longdesc attribute for <img> tags. This is a link to a page with a full description of the image, longer than is possible with the alt attribute. However, this has very little browser support.
A de-facto standard alternative is to put the letter D (short for description) next to an image and use this as the link to the long description. This is called a Dlink.
summary = text. Used for <table> to provide a summary of the table's purpose and structure.
title = text. Used for any element within the <body> to offer advisory information about the element.
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