Roman Catholic Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle

Useful Links

On-line checks

To check accessibility: Truwex on-line accessibilty checker
To validate your html http://validator.w3.org/
To validate your css http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator
 
Reference Sites
 
• RNIB web access centre
• WC3 official web accessibility initiative
• Disability North
• Road Ahead: Artists, musicians and film makers from the North East film about visual impairment
• Download web accessibility toolbar(Vision Australia)
• Web accessibility toolbar add on (WAVE)
• BBC My Web My Way
• Webcredible - usability experts

Suggested Guidelines for Accessible Parish Websites

Try to ensure that your website complies all of the automatic checkpoints of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Priority 1 as a minimum.

The following are some suggested guidelines and recommendations for Parish Websites:

1. Use the ALT attribute to describe graphics and other non-text items
The only information that screen-reader users have about a graphic is the ALT attribute. It is really important to provide a short description for each graphic.

2. Use style sheets to control screen appearance
Style sheets allow great control over the appearance of a website, allowing major changes to be made fairly easily.
Some visually impaired users will replace a web's style sheet with their own, local, style sheet, allowing them to change the colour and font mix of websites.

3. Warn users about new windows or pop-ups
If a link is going to open a new window, users should be warned first.

4. Ensure background noise can be turned off, and does not play automatically on load.

5. Valid css and html
Ensure that the site uses validated HTML and CSS (see link opposite to validate)

6. Language
Use the simplest and clearest language appropriate for a site’s content.

7. Ensure all pages have a descriptive title

8. Resizeable Text
All text including links MUST be able to be resized - don't use fixed font sizes - see HTML Integrity Standards/Fonts
This allows users with poor sight to enlarge the text size

9. Ensure good contrast between text and background
Avoid text and background merging into one another.
Patterned backgrounds should be avoided, or chosen with great care.

10. Ensure text associated with links makes sense out of context
Screenreader users navigate from link to link with the TAB key, and most screenreaders can produce a list of all the links on a page.
This means that the text around the link may be ignored, so the link text must make sense by itself. Link text MUST contain information about its destination. Do not use "click here" or "read more" in isolation
The same text should never be used for different links.

11. Make sure all multimedia elements are optional and/or provide a text alternative
Multimedia components shouldn't load automatically, but only in response to a user action.
If possible a text description should be provided, giving the information in an accessible manner.

12. Give frames meaningful titles. Ideally do not use frames
All frames should be given meaningful titles, such as "Menu" or "Content".
The latest screenreaders read these titles out when entering or leaving a frame.
Some of the older screenreaders, however, do not handle frames well,and can fail to process frames based websites at all.

13. Avoid absolute positioning
Using absolute positioning puts the appearance of the page over the content.
Absolute positioning can easily result in loss of content - overlapping or cropped text, for example - when the size of text is adjusted.