What are the minimum steps that I should follow to ensure that my web site is accessible?

• Ensure that every image has alt text.
• Make sure that your colour scheme is suitable for those with colour blindness.
• Offer a high contrast layout or large text layout for the visually impaired.
• Make sure your links make sense when read out of context (i.e. don't just write "click here").
• Ensure your site still offers full basic functionality if the user does not have JavaScript support.

The W3 offers some basic tips on accessibility via its website. Joe Clark has an online version of his "Building Accessible Websites" book available to view for free which contains a lot of useful information.

Making your mark-up semantic is a massive step towards accessibility, if your site can be navigated without any CSS being applied to it and the content makes sense then everything else is just visual gravy!

Firstly the “the disabled” means nothings!

So let look at some groups of people you need to check can you’re your web site.

A poor person that only has a note-book with a small screen

You just need to check your website can be used when the browser window is small without too match pain.

A colour blind person

Can someone use your website without seeing the colour of icons etc, imaged you were accessing it on a B&W monitor.

A person with poor site.

When your changes the type size in the browser, does all text get bigger in your site, and is the layout still OK. Also can the site still be used on a small monitor?

Does your site use a high contrast layout, if not is it easy for the user to switch to a high contrast layout?

A person that can’t use the mouse

Can a person that has never used your website before, access all functions/information just be using the keyboard. (Does the tab key work in a useful way?)

Someone with poor reading skills

You are using simple English as much as possible?

Someone that is not good at learning new things.

Is the design of your site based on other site your users already know how to use?

A blind person.

This is the hard one and most of what you read is not of match use!!
Short out all our other access problems first, as there are a lot more people with poor sight, or who can’t use the mouse than there are bind people.

Next understand your aims, e.g if your site is a hotel booking site, it may be better to provide a fee phone number for making bookings and then just make the hotel information accessible.

Most blind people find it very hard to use any interactive website they have not used before, however well the website is designed.

So should you provide a none web option? (Phone? A person that visit them to help fill in the form etc?)

Firstly can your site be used without any images? (Alt text is one way of doing this)

Given the speech software reads the site top to bottom, can your site be understood in that way?

It is very hard to make a site with complex navigation easy for a bind person to use, also a bind person has no way of know that part of the page has been updated by JavaScript and need to be read again.

Changing the colour of items for changes of state is also not a good option.

The only way to learn how to make a website work well for bind people is to see how a bind person uses a screen reader on some websites. None of the standards are good enough, they just tell you what you should not do, but keeping to them are not enough (unless you are just provided static text like a news paper site).