How to make your Web site more accessible

Our experts suggest fixes to make a Web site usable by visually impaired Web surfers.

Linda Rhodes, Express Framing and Stained Glass
I operate a small framing and stained glass business and art studio in a rural area of West Virginia. I want my Web site to be accessible to the entire community. Recently, a severely visually impaired individual inquired about artwork in our gallery. We fall short when it comes to making our site and our gallery more friendly and accessible to the visually impaired. Please take a look at our site and give us some feedback.

By Diana Rosenthal, Fortune Small Business contributor
Dear Linda: Making your website accessible to the visually impaired and blind can seem intimidating for a company that sells artwork – but it only takes a few fixes to make your site visible to all customers. And there's an important fringe benefit: the same fixes should make your Web site more visible to search engines.

According to Garry Grant, CEO of Search Engine Optimization, the first step in improving your Web site lies in the coding of your photographs and images. Grant recommends using ALT HTML attributes, commonly referred to as ALT tags, which are alternate textual descriptions of the images on your site.

Most visually impaired and blind Web surfers use screen-reading programs that read only the text on the screen out loud. If your site’s navigation bar features unlabeled links or product images, a blind person won’t know they exist.

“On a page where the navigation links at the top are all pictures, it may be perfectly clear to a sighted person, but a screen reader just can’t recognize it,” says Chris Danielson, public relations specialist for the National Federation of the Blind. “You can’t even navigate the website because you don’t know what the links mean.”

Grant encourages Web developers to be as descriptive as possible, either in ALT tags or in expandable captions that accompany each image.

“Close your eyes and describe [the image] without looking at it,” Grant says. “And don’t worry about colors; the blind community associates colors with different textures.”

Our experts recommend that you avoid Flash animations and JavaScript on your site. Instead use CSS (cascading style sheets). They also advise close attention to the sequence in which the items on each page load, in order to prevent a confusing audio translation of the page.

“The more graphic-intense a site is, the more plug-ins it has,” says Uri Estrin, president of Web development firm Estrin Technologies. “It will be less functional for the visually impaired.”

Danielson and Estrin both caution against using visual-only CAPTCHAs, which are images with letters and numbers that appear jumbled and function to prevent spammers from accessing secure information, like e-mail addresses and credit-card numbers.

CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart, was developed in 2000 at Carnegie Mellon University. Though our experts agree that CAPTCHAs are effective, visually impaired users need an audio version that also deters spammers.

Danielson also reminds Web developers to make sure Web sites can be navigated without the use of a mouse. (Visually impaired users favor keyboard shortcuts and the Tab key.)

“Fixing accessibility issues not only expands your website to a new demographic and more potential customers, but also increases the crawlability of your site for search engines, which in turn gives you higher placements and greater visibility,” Grant says in a blog post he wrote on the topic.

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