I took a look at dw_docs, and was impressed at the amount of care the group is taking to ensure Dreamwidth is accessible to people with disabilities. I found a couple of links to accessibility checkers, one of which was this:
FAE (Functional Accessibility Evaluator):
http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu/I ran a website that I created many years ago through FAE. Epic fail.
As an exercise, I decided to make the website pass an FAE check (just the home page - not even trying to do the rest of the site done yet). Luckily there were no tables, so I didn't have to apply heading label codes to each table cell.
One thing that I have not yet figured out how to do is to apply LABEL tags to form elements with the FOR attribute. For the time being, I took out a form that was situated at the bottom of the page - it was no longer necessary since there is an alternate way to accomplish the same thing with a simple link. I still want to figure out how to do the LABEL tags properly, though, so I will be revisiting that. It took about 3 hours to get the front page to pass. Some areas of failure were:
Inline FONT, CENTER, and B (bold) tags rather than using CSS and structural markup (I had CSS in place, but didn't use it consistently).
No language specification in the HTML tag: For example, HTML LANG="EN-US".
No META tag defining the content type placed in the <head> section: For example,
META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1".
No H1 (main heading) element.
No text heading - I had used images for the headings.
The use of forms without LABEL tags.
The use of images with no ALT tags (some of them had them but use was inconsistent).
The use of images that were less than 8 pixels wide or long (I had used a stripe image as a page divider). The preferred method is to display ornamental aspects of the page by defining them in the CSS.
Use of frames - FAE did not point this out, but this is generally frowned upon. Server side Includes or some other method of parceling out a page would be favored. I have not corrected this yet (a job for a weekend sometime).
And so forth. Anyway, I corrected all of that, and converted an inline java Lake applet to a static image. I really like the lake applet, but it had an annoying habit of breaking whenever Firefox updated itself, and it caused the page to be very slow to load, and it was possibly exploitable, even with the recent patches.
The page certainly loads faster now, if nothing else, but it looks pretty plain. I can probably spice it up by learning more CSS. The trick will be to be able to include various pretty things without failing the checker...
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