W3C Accessibility and Why Use It for Web Standards?
Web Developers have always wondered why they should validate their websites to W3C. Some Web Developers don’t care to validate in W3C and others live by it. Personally you should validate your website in W3C. It doesn’t take any more work or code to do this. It keeps you organized and clean while you develop your website's code. Having a good coding style and W3C will make your site more accessible to disabled individuals. That is the main reason for the W3C, is to keep sites accessible for individuals that might be using screen readers or other instruments while surfing the web. W3C is also becoming a part of business and search engine optimization, keeping you with the technological advancement.
What Does W3C Accessibility Stand For?
The World Wide Web Consortium or W3C, have put together a standard to how to code a site to make it accessible to disability individuals. There a number of individuals that are diagnosed with a disability that uses the internet. 26% of W3C disabled people use the internet. This shows that 1 out of 4 people visiting your site could be disabled. Your disability individuals might have small desktop resolutions (800 x 600), keyboard navigation or screen readers. These tools will to help their usability with the content and navigation on the site. If they have screen readers, alt tags and descriptions will help them a lot.
W3C Standards are Easy
With W3C Standards coding your website in W3C isn’t hard, nor isn’t any more work than not coding in W3C. There are some areas you need to consider and remember. Don’t worry they are not hard.
Use Alt Tags and Closing Tags for all Images
Your <img> tags needs to have an "alt" tag with them. An alt tag is a small description about the image, try to use form a description not marketing. This alt tag is used by the web browser to describe the image in text image isn’t displayed. When a web browser cannot find an image it will display the alt tag in its place. In Internet Explorer, you can see these small descriptions when you hover over an image with an alt tag. Also remember to close your image tags with a backslash />.
Why Use Web Standards?
Why do I need alt tags when I know my images are not broken? This is where the accessibility issue comes into play. Let’s make a scenario: An individual that is blind is surfing the Internet. He needs to use a screen reader to help him find links and read content. When he comes across an image without alt tags, the screen reader has no description to read. Now he doesn’t know what he clicking on. If there was a small description alt tag included in the image he would know exactly what it is.
Close All HTML Attribute and Element Brackets
Closing all attributes and tags is another common mistake for W3C. If you have a <p> <b> html tag. You need to close the <b> tag before the <p> tag. Such as: <p> <b>Example Sentence </b> </p>. Another common mistakes is the <br> tag, the proper way to code a line break is <br />. Same as the <img> tag, close with a backslash />.
Double Checks the Small Stuff
Another W3C standard to watch for is putting your DOCTYPE, Content-Type and <title>. But as a web developer you are already doing this, so you don’t need a reminder. You can also check your CSS documents to see if they are W3C validated without errors. But that’s for another time to explain that.
World Wide Web Consortium Validate Service
The World Wide Web Consortium or W3C, a standard to how to code a site to make it accessible to disability individuals.
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