Keep accessibility in mind

Our location and event pages are built to support compliance with standards for website accessibility. For example, when adding a photograph or an image, an alt tag will be required. We are working towards achieving the WCAG 2.0, Level AA compliance because we believe everyone should have the ability to access our content.

If you decide to build a local website in addition to your location page, we would be delighted if you worked towards the same goal. There are a lot of sites and tools to guide you, but you can start with these resources:

• Markup helps assistive technology navigate a page. That means using lists for lists, headings for headings, and write meaningful text for links.

• Identify images with “alt text”. For people who can’t see images, assistive technology like screen readers look for “alternative text” that describes the image. Photos or images added to your location page will require text to be entered. Be sure to include names, repeat any words that are in the image, and give a very short description of what is happening in the picture, if applicable, or what the image is on the page to communicate.

These are also additional resources you can use:

Tools to check website accessibility

COLOR CONTRAST CHECKERS

These tools let you check whether a foreground and background color combination meets accessibility guidelines. The three here also help you adjust or create the color palette for good contrast.

• Tanaguru color contrast checker lets you lighten or darken the colors until you find an accessible solution.

• Snook’s Colour Contrast Check also lets you experiment to find a good color combination.

• Color Safe is a designer’s tool, creating whole accessible color palettes.

WRITING ALTERNATIVE TEXT FOR IMAGES

• Text alternatives for images: a decision tree – a simple diagram from Dey Alexander, 4Syllables.

• Writing great alt text – Whitney’s slides.

ACCESSIBLE TABLES AND FORMS

• Creating accessible forms – WebAim. Code samples and simple explanations.

• Creating accessible tables – WebAim. More code samples and simple explanations.

Accessibility checkers

These free checkers will analyze web pages for problems and help you fix them. They also work on your content.

• AXE – The Accessibility Engine – from Deque has browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox that will analyze the current page.
• WAVE from WebAIM has an online version and a Chrome extension.
• GrackleTalks checks the accessibility of content in GoogleDocs.

And, the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative has a long list of more evaluation tools.