Creating Accessible Webpages
This page lists tools you can use for ensuring that public facing webpages meet accessibility requirements. These are most appropriate for department members that write certain webpages in raw HTML.
Accessibility Scanners
There are many freely available sources that will scan your any website for accessibility issues and offer suggestions for how to remediate them. Some popular resources are:
Browser Extensions
There are extensions you can add to your browser that will scan the current page you are on and point out any accessibility issues. Some useful ones are
Common Issues with Simple Fixes
These are some basic tips for ensuring accessibility when writing webpages in raw HTML. See also the accessibility page of Yao-Yuan Mao in Physics and Astronomy for additional information.
- Make sure your opening tag is not just <html>, it should be <html lang="en-US"> (or whichever language your page is in)
- If some parts of your page use different languages you can tag their language individually, see the MDN specification of the lang attribute
- Ensure that all image tags have alt text
- Every part of your HTML document must be contained within one of the eight main landmark roles
- <header>, <nav>, <main>, <aside>, <footer>, <form>, <search>, <section>
- Check for color contrast between background and foreground colors
- Do use header tags <h1> through <h6> to outline the document structure, but do not skip levels (i.e. go from <h1> to <h3>)
- For lists use the <ul> tags for unordered lists and the <ol> tags for ordered lists
- For writing math equations in a webpage use MathJax, and the extensive MathJax accessibility features