Web Accessibility Fundamentals

Website Accessibility Training Course Overview

This 2-day web accessibility course provides the core ingredients for good accessibility:

1. Understanding disabled users’ needs and problems on the web
2. Practical web design techniques for creating accessible websites

It brings together the following two 1-day website accessibility courses in a single package — because successful website accessibility depends on proper integration between awareness and practical implementation:

• Understanding Website Accessibility
• Implementing Web Content Accessibility

It encourages accessibility ‘champions’ to strengthen their advocacy by understanding the practical difficulties and trade-offs involved in creating accessible websites using current web design and browser technologies. Similarly, it encourages web designers and developers to do better, by giving as much thought to the needs and objectives of disabled users, as they give to implementing 'accessibility' coding techniques — because such techniques often turn out to be counter-productive, in practice.

Above all, this accessibility training course aims to banish ‘tick-box accessibility’ — replacing it with something which is both more practical and more thoughtful.

Course Objectives

On completing this website accessibility training course, you will be able to:

• Recognise the most common problems that disabled users encounter with conventional web design
• Recognise the different problems that different groups of disabled users experience
• Understand the basic principles of accessible web design
• Understand your responsibilities under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA)
• Comply with the DDA
• Understand the requirements of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
• Bring your website into compliance with the WCAG
• Use progressive enhancement and graceful degradation techniques to:
  • Remove obstacles to site access via assistive technologies
  • Provide additional help and support to disabled users — cost effectively
• Understand how to design accessible web applications and dynamic content — using WAI-ARIA
• Understand and use the accessibility features of:
  • HTML5, HTML4.1 and XHTML 1.0
  • CSS2, CSS2.1 and CSS3

Target Audience

• Web designers
• Web developers
• Web accessibility and usability advocates
• Managers and HR professionals with web accessibility responsibilities

Training Pre-requisites

1. A basic understanding of HTML/XHTML and CSS
2. A bit more than basic computer literacy
3. An interest in web accessibility
4. An open mind

Note: Although web design skills are distinctly advantageous, delegates are not expected to have advanced knowledge of — or be highly skilled in — HTML/CSS. The first and final requirements are only listed here, because good web accessibility sometimes conflicts with popular (mis)conceptions about what web design is — and how it should be practiced.

Training Style

The two parts of this website accessibility course vary somewhat in their learning style.

Both parts of the course include hands-on exercises; offering delegates the opportunity to practice and experiment with the techniques discussed by the tutor.

However, the introductory modules on the first morning are largely informative — rather than practical — in nature. As a consequence, the exercises associated with these modules are designed to put students ‘in the shoes’ of a disabled site visitor — i.e. to create awareness — rather than to teach technique.

For example, students are usually offered the opportunity to browse web sites using a screen reader, but we do not expect or encourage them to become proficient in driving such a tool.