Improving Accessibility

photo credit: riddle_

Here are a few changes I’ve made in an effort to improve Localmouth’s accessibility.

I’m not an expert on this stuff, so if there’s something you’ve spotted that’s still really annoying, difficult to use or just plain needs improving, do please let me know. Thanks!

• Changed logo alt text to say simply ‘Localmouth’
• Set alt text for navigation decoration images to blank
• Set alt text for search button to ’search’
• Provided a link from the limerick map to a text-based alternative list of limericks
• Set alt text for other decorative images to blank
• Tweaked a few bits and pieces to fix XHTML and CSS validity

I found the following resources were very handy:

• Checklist of checkpoints for web content accessibility guidelines
• WebAIM’s ‘appropriate use of alternative text

Plus, of course,

• W3C HTML Markup Validator
• W3C CSS Validator

If you happen to be thinking of reviewing your own website’s accessibility, but just keep putting it off, I highly recommend you look into it (the checklist mentioned above is a good starting point). It may surprise you how easy it is to make the necessary changes.