It is essential to provide all users of your website with an equitable experience. Read SDSU's full accessibility statement to learn more about the advocacy and importance of accessibility at San Diego State University. We have a few recommended tools that can be used to evaluate accessibility of your web pages and ensure that your website meets accessibility standards.
Below is a list of few basic elements that need to be considered while creating your web pages.
Headings
Ensure that the content is organized within headings and subheadings in a hierarchical format by using heading tags (h1 - h6). Assistive technology may use this information to present an outline of the document for the user to aid in their understanding as well as in navigation.
Assistive technology may present a list of links found on the page to ease navigation. It is important to use descriptive and meaningful link text to clearly communicate the destination of links. For example, a user may reach the end of an article and remember that there was a link in the article they wanted to follow. Instead of going back through the entire article to find the link again, they can pull up a list of the links in the article and try to identify the correct link.
Avoid using link text such as “Click here”, “Read more” or “Learn more” as they don’t describe the destination of the link. Words such as “click” aren’t appropriate for users who are not using a mouse to navigate a page.
Don’t use the link URL as the link text as users might find it frustrating to have to listen to the URL being read out loud, especially when it isn't particularly descriptive of the page's contents.
Consider users with low vision, color blindness, light interference and other issues while designing and developing your web pages. Make sure colors have sufficient contrast. Regular text should have at least a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 between text and background. You can evaluate the color contrast using WebAIM’s color contrast checker.
Images
All images must have ALT text describing the content and/or function of the image taking the context into consideration.
For example, a good ALT text for this image would be "Woman grabbing a container of vials in a lab", while a bad ALT tag would be "a woman"
At best, an image without ALT text will be skipped by assistive technology as it will not have a description to provide to the user.
Avoid using images that contain text. Images of text do not scale well and are unreadable for users with low vision on small screens. Use true text instead of images of text. In unavoidable circumstances your alt text should include any text included in the image.
Ensure all videos used on your web page have captions to go along with them. While professionally written captions are preferred, auto-generated captions may be used if they are reviewed and edited for accuracy. Review accessibility considerations, captioning requirements and instruction.
