Accessibility

Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web. Accessibility encompasses all disabilities that affect access to the Web, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities. Creating accessible web sites also benefits others, including older people with changing abilities due to aging, as well as those without disabilities.

There are some basic, well-established principles for accessibility that apply to all computer-mediated materials and software:

Allow for user customisation - particularly of text size and style, background and foreground colours.
Provide equivalent visual and auditory content and interface elements - Text descriptions for images and video, transcription of auditory content, text labelling of interface elements, etc.
Provide compatibility with assistive technologies, for example screenreaders, screen magnifiers and voice recognition software.
Follow operating system conventions.
Allow access to all functionality from keyboard alone i.e. do not require the use of a mouse.
Support efficient navigation by providing context and orientation information, and make this information available to assistive technologies.

The Accessibility in Educational Media (AEM) team (part of IET) are the experts in Accessibility at the OU. They have created the OU Web Accessibility Guidelines and Techniques which can be found here http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/workspace.cfm?wpid=2451.

For more information and advice on how to implement the Accessibility guidelines, contact AEM.

Retrieved from "http://www.open.ac.uk/wikis/webstandards/Accessibility"