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Accessibility Rules


Accessibility is primarily about making your website easy to use for people with disabilities. (It also refers to other special needs, such as people accessing your website using a very slow internet connection in another country, or via a mobile phone, or while driving via a voice interface.) All websites in the UK are required to be accessible, which usually means two things:
  1. Every picture needs an ALT tag which describes the picture. For example, it is illegal in the UK to include the university's logo like this:
    <img src="logo.gif"/>
    
    You must provide a useful description of the picture for blind users by including an ALT tag like this:
    <img src="logo.gif" alt="University Logo"/>
    
  2. Your website must make sense when you use a web browser with all fancy HTML features disabled. This is roughly how a blind person will "see" your website. You can test this out in Firefox by selecting: View, Page Style, No Style. You might need to press the Alt key on your keyboard to see the View menu.