Introduction to Accessibility in Dreamweaver MX
Accessibility has become an important topic for web designers and developers. In this tutorial, we don't look at the why's and wherefore's of accessibility (check out the free Accessibility FAQ
www.dmxzone.com/go?5430 for that ). This is a practical tutorial in which we explore how to use the built-in functionality in Dreamweaver to make existing sites or new development more accessible, without needing to add hours onto development time.
Most of us have never experienced being unable to use a mouse, or having to rely on a screen reader to get information from web sites, and so it is easy to not have accessibility at the front of our minds when working on a site. By switching on the accessibility preferences in Dreamweaver, we have a reminder of the attributes that we can add to make using our site easier for all of our users - without degrading the experience for those using a regular browser who will probably never know that these attributes even exist on the site.
This article stands alone, but is the first in a series that I will be writing for DMXZone, focused on different aspects of accessibility - in a way that is useful for Dreamweaver users. My next article will look at navigation and page layout - thinking about accessibility right at the beginning of designing a new web site.
Overview
Table of Content:
- Alternate Text
- Alt text and images used for layout purposes only
- Inserting Flash Movies or other media elements
- Title
- Access Key
- Tab Index
- Inserting Tables
- Caption
- Align Caption
- Summary
- Header
- Inserting Forms and form elements
- Label
- Access Key
- Tab Index
- Working with framesets
- Accessibility validation
- Conclusion
Rachel Andrew is a trained dancer and singer, whose CV lists jobs as diverse as company choreographer for a physical theatre company to chargehand carpenter for “The Mousetrap” at St. Martin’s Theatre in London’s West End. After leaving the theatre when pregnant with her daughter, Rachel started to design sites mainly out of curiosity into how it worked. It didn’t take too long for her to figure out that her skills lay in development as opposed to design and these days she tends to leave the design to designers so she can concentrate on writing code, dismantling computers and installing Linux on anything that stays still long enough.
Rachel has worked in the industry as a webmaster, technical project manager and senior web developer but in September 2001 set up her own company ‘edgeofmyseat.com’, which provides complete web solutions and outsourced development services for design agencies and Internet start-ups who do not have in-house web developers.
As well as managing and doing much of the development on projects for edgofmyseat.com Rachel is a published author and worked as a co-author on the following titles for Glasshaus:
Dynamic Dreamweaver MX ISBN:1904151108
Fundmental Web Design and development Skills: ISBN:1904151175
Dreamweaver MX Design Projects: ISBN:1904151272
Rachel is also a member of the Web Standards Project serving on The Dreamweaver Task Force.
In her spare time Rachel studies for ‘fun’ with the Open University, does family and local history research and spends time with her 5 year old daughter and her other half, Drew McLellan.
See All Postings From Rachel Andrew >>
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