Keeping Your Site Usable & Accessible
Usability Guidelines
For people that create web content.
| Dos | Donts |
|---|---|
| Make links easy to understand by using descriptive names, e.g. "Events". | Don't give links meaningless names like "find out about our events by clicking here". |
| Test your site in as many different browsers as possible (or at least the ones that your target audience are likely to use). | Don't use 20 words when 10 will do. |
Make documents more meaningful by making use of HTML formatting such as:
| Don't use HTML for layout. |
| Know and understand your target audience. Speak your audience's language and be consistent within and across pages of your site. | Don't worry too much about search engine optimisation (SEO). Make the content of your pages relevant and informative to the audience that they're intended for and the search engines will find them. |
| Test the site with and/or get feedback from a representative sample of real users and use the results/feedback to make informed decisions about how to make the site more usable. | Don't assume that a usability issue that you identify, or that a single user identifies, is a real usability issue. Carry out a test to find out more about the issue first. |
| Follow the KISS principle - Keep It Simple, Sunshine. Be as minimalist as possible without sacrificing aesthetics completely. | Don't add anything that doesn't contribute to the value of the page from your audience's point of view. |
Online Resources
Accessibility Guidelines - WCAG 1.0
Use these guidelines to determine where your site complies with or fails to comply with specific accessibility criteria. Use the associated techniques for WCAG 1.0 documents to fix areas of non-compliance according to your target level of conformity. See also these quick tips for making accessible websites.
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) compliance - Watchfire WebXACT
Use this service to check that a page passes a specific set of automated accessibility checks. This is a very useful tool for quickly highlighting accessibility issues that might have escaped your notice. It is not a complete accessibility test suite and must be used in conjunction with careful and systematic manual checks against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
HTML Validation - WDG HTML Validator
Use this service to check that the (X)HTML of any page is valid and conforms properly to it's published Document Type Definition (DTD). You can check a single page or an entire site. If a page does not validate, it is not standards compliant and this can affect accessibility.
CSS Validation - W3C CSS Validation Service
Use this service to check that a CSS file contains valid style sheet information.