Dreamweaver And Website Accessibility

Accessibility, in the context of websites, refers to the degree to which the content you add to your web site can be accessed by your audience; all of them, not just the able bodied ones and those with 20/20 vision. Accessible websites offer good support for screen readers, cater for users who browse the web without viewing graphics and who wish to magnify the text on your pages to a level comfortable for their eyesight.

Creating accessible web pages is the responsibility of the person developing the web site. However, Dreamweaver has a couple of features which assist web page creators in ensuring that their pages are accessible. Firstly, the program can be asked to display a dialog with relevant accessibility options whenever you add an element to a page. The program also has an accessibility check feature which looks for elements on the page which are not accessible.

When you install Dreamweaver CS3, there are a couple of program settings which relate to accessibility which you should ensure remain activated. To check that these settings are active, you should choose Preferences in the Edit menu then click on the Accessibility category on the left of the screen. Make sure that the options "Show Attributes For..." "Form objects", "Media" and "Graphics" are all switched on. Also, click on the General category and activate "Use CSS instead of HTML tags".

The result of activating these elements is that when you apply formatting attributes to text or to the body of the page, Dreamweaver will create CSS tags to achieve the formatting since CSS makes web pages more accessible by separating formatting information from the actual page content. Another consequence will be that, each time you add certain elements to a page, a dialog will appear prompting you to choose which of the relevant accessibility attributes you wish to associate with that element.

With the accessibility options activated, whenever you insert an image onto the page, Dreamweaver will display a dialog asking you to enter alternate text (alt text). The alt attribute provides a description of the image which can be seen by anyone waiting for the image to load on a slow internet connection. Anyone browsing your site with a screen reader will rely on your alt text to know what each image contains.

You will also notice an option to enter the file path of a file containing a long description of the image. Such a file should be prepared for images containing more detail than can be described with an alt tag, for example, a technical illustration or a photograph containing important details.

When the accessibility options relating to forms are active, Dreamweaver will display a dialog of options every time a form or form element is added to the page. The first set of options relates to the addition of the LABEL tag which serves to associate descriptive text labels with the form control to which they relate. The dialog also allows you to specify the order in which elements will be accessed by pressing the Tab key on the keyboard.

When a media element, such as a Flash movie, video or sound clip is inserted on a page, Dreamweaver will prompt the user to enter a title, access key and tab index. The title provides information regarding the media element in much the same way as alt text does for images. Access key offers users who find use of the mouse difficult an alternative method of accessing the media element using a keyboard shortcut. The tab index allows the creator of the page to specify the order in which elements on the page can be activated by using the Tab key.

In addition to assisting you in making elements accessible, Dreamweaver has a utility for checking the accessibility of any page in your site. To use this feature, you need to have the page open and any changes saved. Choose File - Check Page - Accessibility. Dreamweaver will perform an analysis of the page and display a summary of its results. It will list all elements which could be regarded as inaccessible. You can double-click on any element in the list to highlight it both in the code and on the page.

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