Welcome to Web Axe - Practical Web Accessibility Tips
Hello and welcome to Web Axe. This is your host Dennis Lembree and I'm coming from outside Ypsilanti, Michigan. Basically, this podcast is just about web accessibility, Section 508 etc, so it's for any programmers, coders or anyone else interested in techniques for making accessible websites. And if you have any questions on what an accessible website is, then why don't you check out the websites that I'm going to - the URLs I'll give you at the end of this podcast.
But basically what it is about is about people who are using alternative input devices or different "user agents", it's just to make sure these people can access the same content as somebody using just a typical browser. A lot of people think that accessibility is just about the handicapped so that a blind or deaf person can get at the same content as, you know, a fully enabled person. But that's not always the case and that's a whole other discussion.
So, just a quick background on myself. Again, my name is Dennis and I've been a web designer/programmer for about 8 years or so and for a few odd other years, I've done some marketing and some electronic publishing and some technical writing.
So, some of the topics that I'd like to cover in upcoming episodes of Web Axe are going to be things like tables and forms - making sure your HTML forms are accessible, and the skip nav feature, maybe we'll talk about colours, and to make sure your site is, you know, accessible or 508 compliant as far as the colours go. And another item I'd written down that we could talk about would be phrase elements, such as abbreviation, and proper use of block quote and some of the newer ones like cite and keyboard.
So essentially, I'll just be going through the code and giving practical tips on how to clean up your code and add some tags and make your site more accessible and user friendly. So with that, I'll just go over three websites that I think are very very valuable as far as web accessibility and then I'll see you at the next podcast.
The first one is by the W3C and it's the Web Accessibility Initiative. So the URL is [w3.org/wai]. The next website I want to give you is the United States Federal Government site [Section508.gov] which is basically the United States Federal Law on accessibility. And the third site I'd like to reference for you is WebAIM which stands for Web Accessibility In Mind which is a great site and it just has a lot of good practical tips - the site itself is a good example. You can find that at [webaim.org].
Okay, so that's it for this quick first episode of Web Axe, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening.
Editor's Note: The UK's web accessibility law is [The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA)].