Paul Sweatte

Here’s a summary of possible coding standards to meet the accessibility guidelines recommended by the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the government:

Make all form and link navigation keyboard accessible

Use CSS rollovers and title attributes to provide inline help text for usage details

Use alt text for all images and title text for links

Use UTF-8 encoding

An acronym is an abbreviation in which each letter means something. IE6 do doesn’t support abbr element, so
apply a span around it or apply the title attribute to it.

Put descriptive text after radio buttons and check boxes, but before other form fields(to the left or at the top)

Use tooltips (longdesc) for detailed alt text and previews

Use labels for each form field

Use optgroup for nested select options

Use fieldset for radio buttons

Don’t use onchange events to submit forms or open popups

Hide unneccesary form fields(such as spouse’s name) until the user enters date(such as “married” marital status) that meets the prerequisite condition

Divide forms with multiple submit buttons into individual pages

Don’t use JavaScript for navigation since it can be disabled or unavailable

Don’t use tables to build forms

Don’t use images as wrappers for input buttons or links that control JavaScript widgets since images can be disabled or unavailable

Don’t use autoscrolling or autorefreshing functions that can’t be stopped or reset

Don’t end sessions that timeout without showing a warning and saving the most recent form data

Don’t play sounds automatically without prominently displaying an off button

Don’t automatically redirect users without giving a status message on a transitional page

Use consistent names for buttons with the same function that are cloned throughout a site

Don’t use meta redirects or timed refreshes

Use a redirect to a Google or Yahoo cache if a URL takes longer than ten seconds to respond

Use onkeypress as an accessible alternative to every onclick event

Use onfocus as an accessible alternative to every onmouseover event

Don’t simulate links with divs or other elements that don’t contain links. Use an <area> tag instead

Only use headers for section delimiters, not presentation(Use a font class for that)

Only use blockquote for quotes, not indenting(Use a span with right positioning defined)

Don’t put descriptive text in separate tags from the links they describe, always put it in the a tag

Don’t put different navigation menus on different pages

Don’t put focus on a form field automatically after a page load

Use bold or italic styles for the default states of links that are not underlined by default

Provide captions and alt text for all multimedia content

Use the word “Required” in red above required fields

Provide a site map and use it to generate the navigation

Provide a table of contents on each page based on the headers

Provide breadcrumbs on each page

Provide help links that generate tooltips on forms

Provide acceptable example data for form fields

Allow users to undelete content and reverse transactions within a specified time after the change

Allow users to double-check form field input before submission

Allow users to jump between pages using a table of contents

Use both www.sitename and http://sitename for loading large images in parallel

Add a plain-text equivalent page for all JavaScript generated content

Add a printable view for all paginated content

Add a “View All” option to convert a paginated list into a scrolling list

Add download links to all required plugins for viewing data within the site

Alert users of timeouts and allow users to extend time limits

References:

ARIA Reference
WAI-ARIA Best Practices
Developing Accessible Widgets with ARIA
Accessible HTML
Techniques for Multilingual Websites
Back to Top” links considered harmful
Why Click here is bad linking practice
Guidelines on using alt text in img elements
Tooltips and alt text for image maps
Links want to be Links
Augmentative Authoring
Graceful Degradation
Accessible JavaScript and HTML forms
Accessibility Tips
Accessibility Tools
WCAG Errata
WCAG 2.0 Shortcomings
Accessible URL Design
Accessible JavaScript
Accessibility for Web Designers
Software Accessibility References
Voluntary Product Accessibility Template(VPAT)
Accessible Google Search
Accessibility Blog
IE8 Accessibility User Improvements
What’s New for Accessibility in IE8
VisiCheck Color Blindness Tool
Ktype Mouse Driven Typing Tool
Dive into Accessibility
Web Accessibility Principles Quick Reference
Keyboard Accessibility in web Applications: Part 1
Keyboard Accessibility in Web Applications: Part 2
Keyboard Accessibility in Web Applications: Part 3
Printer-Friendly Page Conversion Service
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/accessibility_from_the_ground_up/
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/complete.html
http://www.bestkungfu.com/archive/date/2004/04/gmail-and-web-app-accessibility/