For those of you who have tried getting your site to follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines you will most like notices that it is imposible to get your site to follow it exactly. There is one section that makes it imposible to get right, keyboard access, checkpoints 9.4 and 9.5.

Checkpoint 9.4 is to “create a logical tab order through links, form controls and objects.” If you are running dynamic content systems like I am, you just cannot do it, it would meen that every time I added a new post to my blog I would have to change every link in every post on my blog, and even then I would have problems. Every article is on multiple pages, which means that the tab order will be different on each page. I could make a script that would disect the HTML and add a tabindex tag to each of the elements that needs it but for all that is worth I might as well let the browser work out the tab order itself.

Checkpoint 9.5 is “provide keyboard shortcuts to important links, form controls, and groups of form controls.” This one is imposible to do, on my keyboard I have about 35 keys that I can safely use for keyboard shortcuts if I do not want them to get confused with other keyboard shortcuts the browser already has (for example Ctrl and S is Save). I counted 83 elements on my homepage that would need a keyboard shortcut, something just does not add up. My keyboard seems to be missing 48 keys, if anyone finds them please email them to me.

You might find this funny but making your website accessible by everyone is set out by law in a number of countries already (W3C Web Accessibility). If someone cannot access the content on your site they can sue you. If you are running a non-profit fan site you really can’t afford to be sued because your website is not accessible.

Although you can’t guarantee that your website will be accessible to everyone you should at least do your best to make sure it works for as many people as possible. The best way to do this is to test your site in a number of browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, etc) if you have one check your site on your mobile phone or PDA. If you have access to an Apple Mac check it out in Safari. The more browser you check it in the better your website will be.

Also remember to make sure all your images have an alt text or long description and where you can use text instead of images. Make sure you can proof read your content a few days after you have written it, or get someone else to read it. If they can’t read it what chance has someone using a screen reader got of understand your content?

There are a number of tutorials on Accessibility on ILoveJackDaniels.com. There many others as a quick search in Google will show.