A11yFirst Introduction

Inclusive Authoring: Creating Accessible Documents

What is accessibility?

Accessibility, as it relates to a web document, is a set of features or qualities that enables all of the information contained in the document to be perceivable and understandable by all readers, including people with disabilities.

Important concept: all of the information -> all readers

Who benefits from accessibility?

In general, all readers of your document. Importantly, this includes people with disabilities such as:

  • blindness, other visual impairments
  • deafness, hard of hearing
  • cognitive impairments
  • learning disabilities

Who is responsible for the accessibility of a web document?

The author! Only you know what you are trying to communicate.

What makes a web document accessible?

Some of the more important features include:

  1. Well-defined structure: use of headings and subheadings; appropriate use of lists and tables
  2. Text equivalents for images, audio, video
  3. Avoidance of using visual styling alone to convey structure or meaning

What is a text equivalent?

When a reader of your document is unable to see or hear non-text content such as an image or audio clip, a text equivalent provides an accessible description that conveys all of the pertinent information that the visual or audio content would convey to readers that do not have that particular disability.

Important concept: equivalency between the image or audio content and its text description

How to think about whether your document is accessible?

A couple of simple tests/thought experiments:

  1. Turn off your monitor and imagine that you are relying on a screen reader[1] to understand what the document, including all of its images, communicates to its readers. Are you getting all of the information?
  2. Turn off your speakers and imagine that you are relying on captioning or a text transcript of the audio content to understand what the document communicates to its readers. Again, are you getting all of the information?

[1] A screen reader is an assistive technology that enables a person who is blind or visually impaired to obtain and interactively utilize an audio (via speech synthesis) or braille rendering of a document.