This is probably the one area that most people involved in websites know about. You have to have an alt tag on an image (actually if you’re in point-scoring mode then it’s an alt attribute in an image tag).

In the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) this is covered under checkpoint 1.1:
Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element (e.g., via “alt”, “longdesc”, or in element content). This includes: images, graphical representations of text (including symbols), image map regions, animations (e.g., animated GIFs), applets and programmatic objects, ascii art, frames, scripts, images used as list bullets, spacers, graphical buttons, sounds (played with or without user interaction), stand-alone audio files, audio tracks of video, and video.
As you can see this is not just about images but other multimedia content that you might include on the website. It’s a priority level 1 requirement, so you need …

Let’s start with a spot the difference competition. Here are two web pages - version 1 and version 2 - that display the same content with the same look & feel. There isn’t an awful lot on the page to go wrong, but one would fail the Double-A accessbility criteria.

It’s that easy to create content that would fail the accessibility requirements!

What’s the problem? Well, even though the pages look the same the heading at the top is marked up in the underlying code in different ways. In the first (correct) version there is a heading level 1 tag (with an h1 tag) whilst in the second (incorrect) version the same text is just marked up as a paragraph (with a p tag).

They might look the same in your browser but if you were presented only with the HTML code then …

Database-driven websites are commonplace for many organisations. Content management systems (CMS), blogging tools, etc. are no longer the preserve of large enterprises, and with them the days of requiring a web expert or design agency to put up the latest press release have gone. The balance of control has shifted and now it is the people who create the content in the first place who are able to write their own text.

However with that power comes responsibilities and one of those is to ensure that the website is accessible. For most public sector organisations in the UK this means that they must comply with the double-A (or AA) guidelines of the Web Content Accessibility Guide (WCAG) from the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C).

Most content providers are focussed on the text that they are creating and how it is to be styled. However at the same time they are involved in generating …