Training: Checking Website accessibility with free tools and resources

This course is suitable for:

For anyone who manages or develops websites; both beginner and experienced developers will get a lot out of this course.

Suitable for people who work in the public sector or private sector, e.g Local council, voluntary sector or corporate environment. If you would like to create standards compliant accessible web pages this is a suitable course for you.

This is a half-day course.

• What is accessible website design; finding a working definition.
• Introducing standard markup and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)?
• How can we make the presentation of content more flexible?
• Introducing the Internet Explorer website accessibility tool.
• Introducing the World Wide Web Consortium Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Research exercise: designing a website for people with dyslexia

Short break for tea and coffee.

Website accessibility checking: using the Internet Explorer website accessibility tool and online resources to check the accessibility of a website of your choice.

Hands-on exercises

• Check page code for errors based on workbook.
• Find the standard used to code the page (i.e. the DOCTYPE).
• Looking at page structure.
• Exploring screen size issues.
• Colour contrast and colour blindness check.
• Fonts and text size issues.
• Checking labels for non-text elements.
• Looking at the link text.
• Checking for scripting issues.
• Using online website accessibility checkers.

Feedback from the course was very positive. The course was administered by Joanne Martin of The Scottish Accessible Information Forum. Contact Joanne to ask about the feedback from the course and the skills of the trainer. Contact details can be found at http://www.saifscotland.org.uk