WEBVTT

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There are two main reasons.

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The first that it's a legal requirement
in almost all countries that you make

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websites that anyone can use,
even if they have reduced abilities.

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This isn't the best reason,

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but for organizations with legal
compliance is a priority.

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It can be a very powerful one.

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The second issue is that we find
that accessibility is closely connected

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with general usability
and search engine optimization (SEO).

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When we do things
to improve accessibility,

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we end up improving
both of these other topics.

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It turns out that search engine optimization
and accessibility

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have more in common than you might think.

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They both need to deal with technology
that's trying to understand the pages.

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In the case of accessibility,
assistive technology needs to present it

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to users with reduced abilities
who perhaps cannot see it or hear it.

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So assistive technologies

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will attempt to present web pages
in an appropriate form for those users.

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For search engines,

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the Web crawlers need to understand

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the contents of the pages
so they can be indexed correctly.

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So the structure of the content
needs to make sense in both cases,

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cascading style sheets can work wonders in
making a messy HTML page look brilliant.

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But style sheets are complex to interpret.

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Assistive technology and search crawlers
may simply ignore them.

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That means if you're relying on style
sheets to present your content

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in a meaningful order,
those adjustments go away.

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Here are some general guidelines for
implementing accessibility in web design.

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One of the keys to accessibility
is to design for assistive technologies

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or to at least be aware
of assistive technologies.

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When you're designing,

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if you're looking at visual impairment
then the screen readers

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are the main assistive technology there.

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Screen readers take the contents of the screen
and read it out to you.

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They are now built into most platforms
by default, including smartphones.

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But if you want

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to ensure your website works well,
the screen is you should try it out.

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An accessibility
specialist may be helpful in that respect.

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Screen readers deal with written content,
but an important issue

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is that we need to provide
non text content in alternative media.

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This is the dreaded ALTtext

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that you are frequently prompted
for when creating images.

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This is because screen readers are great
for reading out text in HTML,

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but if it happens to be text
embedded in an image, it has little hope.

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And for meaning pictorial images

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Despite the rise of AI, users are likely
to get a description

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of what an image shows
rather than what it was intended to mean.

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And just as a quick side note,

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ALT text with decorative images
should always be empty

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and empty ALT-tag tells assistive technology
that is not important and can be ignored.

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If you've got video clips
or audio recordings on your site,

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you need to provide text alternatives
for that.

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Closed captions and transcripts are best
and are now provided

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automatically by many tools.

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Of course, one of the real usability
advantages of text

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alternatives is that you can search them.

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So if you were looking on your internet
or on a website

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for something that somebody said,
then you could find that in the transcript

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and have the entire text
available to you there.

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But most changes for accessibility
do benefit all users,

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especially when you start to think about
how can we simplify this layout?

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How can we make the
whole thing easier to use?