Accessible web design in the tertiary education sector. 
Current practice and future possibilities – D. Sweeney

Overview
•	Principles of accessible web design
•	Recognising accessibility barriers on the web
•	Steps to take to enhance the accessibility of your institution's web presence

Principles
•	The web starts out accessible, barriers are built
•	Choose the right technologies
•	Use them as they were designed
•	Pay attention to the semantic structure of your documents
•	WYSIWYG myths (WYSIOWYS)

Principles - separating web technologies
•	(X)HTML - for content
•	CSS - for presentation
•	Javascript - for behaviour
•	… then the rest

Recognising barriers
•	Resize the text
•	Get an accessibility toolbar/extension
•	Turn off styles
•	Turn off javascript
•	Validate the code
•	Scripting behaviour (AJAX/Hijax)

Examples - bad and good
•	USyd (images for text)
•	UniMelb LMS (scripting)
•	myCQU (code validation)
•	RMIT Union (CSS design)
•	AIRport (unobtrusive scripting, multimedia)
•	WANAU (stylesheet changer)

Your backyard
•	Train up or get rid of old-style designers
•	Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done
•	Include accessibility statements in your requirements documents
•	Insist on user and browser testing

Your backyard (cont...)
•	Learn to recognise poor design

Look for:
•	tables used for layout
•	text as part of an image
•	Flash used without cause
•	'best viewed in x browser / at x resolution'
•	back button stops working

Resources
W3C - http://w3.org 
Code validation - http://validator.w3.org 
WAI - http://w3.org/WAI 
ALA (for designers) - http://alistapart.com 
S5 - http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ 
WANAU - http://wanau.org