Getting Started

Introduction to Web accessibility

You may wish to begin by reading the Introduction to Web Accessibility from WebAIM. This is one of the more comprehensive considerations of the issues surrounding specific disability groups and access to the net.

A video called "Keeping Web Accessibility in Mind" also provides a solid introduction to web accessibility and its importance today. For an informative demonstration of screen reader technology for the blind and visually impaired, see the video produced by the Trace Research Center called "Introduction to the Screen Reader". Beyond introducing viewers to this dynamic technology, the video offers a good overview of some of the unique problems facing this technologically savvy group of internet users.

Guidelines

Currently, there are two different sets of guidelines that lay out the specific rules that define quite differently the standards for web accessibility. The rules issued by the U.S. government in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1998, referred to simply as the 508 Guidelines, apply to all government agencies and institutions that receive government funding. The second most commonly sited guidelines, issued by the W3 Consortium, are the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) rules, which go beyond the Section 508 standards.

For a good introduction to the Section 508 Guidelines, start out by reading the first page of Jim Thatcher's online tutorial. The rest of this excellent tutorial is geared toward people who know HTML so you should avoid that unless you are familiar with HTML.

For those who are unfamiliar with the content of the 508 federal regulations, we recommend that you look at our brief overview of the Section 508 Guidelines, which represents a good starting point to begin learning about the concepts behind creating accessible web sites.

For those looking for a more in depth tutorial on how to address these issues, you may wish to look at the Section 508 tutorial from the access board. It's a good, short tutorial of the guidelines and why they are important. Though this tutorial is a little more technical, one can always ignore the specific HTML examples.

Finally, if you would like to learn about the WAI guidelines, which are considerably more thorough in scope than the 508 federal rules, please check out our overview of these standards.

Evaluation

After reading through overviews of the various guidelines, you will need to check to see if your site is indeed compliant with whichever set of standards apply to your pages. There are many programs available that can check pages for various aspects of Web Accessibility. Keep in mind, however, that it is still necessary to have a working knowledge of the issues surrounding web accessibility. In other words, these automated checkers cannot do it all. Beyond the fact that there are certain things that even the most advanced software checkers cannot check for, you will still need to evaluate the reports generated by these packages and fix the problems.

For smaller sites and those with limited resources, there are two free programs, Bobby Online or A-Prompt, that can flag basic accessibility shortcomings. To read more about these services and view a list of other Web Validation programs, please go to our page on Evaluation tools.

Learning More

Check out our Accessibility Resources Page for more links. If you create Web pages then you can continue on to our Getting Started Page for Webmasters.

The University of Washington has some good overview/getting started Web pages.