Accessibility.

Not everybody surfing the net is using a graphical browser and even those who do may have issues with certain aspects of viewing the website. It is important to bear this in mind when you design the website, particularly for commercial and community service sites. In some countries (e.g. the USA) it is mandatory to have sites pass certain accessibility criteria.

We do not intend to give you a complete list of all the rules as they are available from other sources, such as CAST and the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative.

Some of the issues:

Visitors must be able to change font sizes (people with poor vision cannot read small text);
All important images should have a description in their "alt" attribute and where appropriate, further descriptions must be available;
There should be sufficient contrast between the foreground (text) and background;
Ideally, content should be separated from presentation, by using style sheets;
The site should still be legible without the style sheet (Back to the formatted page);
If scripting is used to dynamically generate content, the site must still be workable without it
The site's content must follow a logical format - heading tags (<H1> to <H6>) must be used to separate sections and sub-sections - these are not to be used just to "make text bigger".

Further information:

For more details, pleaserefer to the following sites: