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Accessibility

Web accessibility matters. Although primarily concerned with making websites accessible to people with disabilities, many accessibility practices benefit the full range of web users while also boosting a site's search engine rankings. Ancilliary advantages aside, the basic techniques of web accessibility offer people with disabilities unprecedented access to information and interaction—access unimaginable less than a generation ago—which is why Luminous is built to the highest accessibility standards.

Please note: This document discusses web accessibility in some detail, so the going can get technical. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to contact me.

Standards Compliance

Several organizations, including the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), have established accessibility guidelines for web developers. Every page on Luminous meets the following standards benchmarks:

Markup and Stylesheets

The Luminous website uses structured semantic markup; all layout, positioning, and style is controlled by cascading stylesheets (CSS). No device-dependent markup is used, nor are tables employed for layout. In addition, all pages validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS2. Together, these practices provide a range of advantages, including the following:

  • All pages are fully readable and usable without stylesheets and in all browsing devices.
  • Since site stylesheets use only relative font-sizing units, users can control text size via "text size" options in visual browsers.
  • Structured markup, in addition to being easier to manage and better for search engines, provides an alternate means of navigation in JAWS and other browsers and screen readers.
  • Valid, CSS-based development helps to ensure the site renders correctly—and remains accessible—in all browsers and operating systems available today and emerging tomorrow.

Navigation and Links

Luminous uses a straightforward approach to navigation, with consistently-positioned navigation areas and clearly identified links. The following practices help to further enhance and augment site navigation:

  • All pages include a search box and sitemap link.
  • "Previous" and "next" links follow each Weblog entry.
  • To aid navigation in text-only browsers and screen readers, relevant pages include rel=previous, next, and home metadata links.
  • Link text clearly identifies the link destination. When necessary, a title attribute (accessed by mousing over the link text) describes the destination in greater detail.
  • Links are written to make sense when read out of context. (Many browsers such as JAWS, Home Page Reader, Lynx, and Opera, can extract a list of links on a page, allowing the user to browse the list separately from the page.)
  • There are no javascript pseudo-links. Links can be followed in any browser, including those without scripting or when scripting is turned off.
  • Links are never used to open new windows. An annoyance to many, newly spawned windows not only disable the back button (the web's second-most used navigation feature), they present a serious problem for screen reader users, whose software always reads the content of the topmost browser window.

Images and Colors

  • All content images include descriptive alt text so that users who have turned off image display or are using screen readers will receive an equivalent image description. (Purely decorative graphics include null alt text.)
  • All information conveyed with color is accessible without color.

Forms

  • All form fields include an appropriately positioned label that identifies the purpose of the field. (This is particularly important for screen reader users, who lack the visual clues often used to determine a field's purpose.)

Content

  • While the site is written for an sophisticated audience of web developers and designers, effort is made to write clearly and avoid technical jargon.