Help yourself as well as others

In most articles on website accessibility you will normally find that one of the first things to be discussed is the fact that one should split the layout of your site from the content of that site. Have you ever wondered why this is so?

Splitting the layout from the content means that you should use cascading style sheets (CSS) along with your (X)HTML markup. (X)HTML was never meant or designed to control document layout. (X)HTML is supposed to be used to mark up headings, paragraphs, lists, hypertext links, and other structural parts of the page. Once this is done you need to add a separate style sheet to specify the layout.

Most of this is ‘old hat’ to most of us. So what has this actually got to do with website accessibility?

There are many reasons why these things are important but allow me to concentrate only on one. Visually impaired or blind users of the Web rely on speech synthesizers or Braille readers to read the text. The software used in these readers cannot handle any layout features that might be included in the (X)HTML.

Many of us are bloggers using templates which are supposed to be accessible to start off with. Why is this important to us? That template you are using might have been designed to meet all the accessibility standards but unfortunately the template can only be as accessible as the last piece of markup you added when you added your last post.

I have found countless number of sites that have split the content from the layout but then just ruined it all with sloppy (X)HTML when the articles were added. HTML documents are supposed to be structured around items such as paragraphs, headings and lists, everything else belongs in the style sheets. There are however still numerous layout elements that are often included directly in the markup. A good example of this is the font tag which is often used to make certain portions of the page stand out from the rest. If you do something like this you are adding layout features to your markup, this stuff should be included in the style sheet. If you do something like this you are making your pages inaccessible.

If you follow these simple guidelines the chances are excellent that all browsers will display your page properly. Any changes you need to make afterwards now also becomes a lot easier as you normally only have to make the desired changes in a single place. So in making things easier for others you are in fact making things easier for yourself as well.

I would like to express my thanks to the W3C who made me think of all this with the great information contained on their XHTML2 Working Group Home Page.

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