Accessible Design: Best Practices

Introduction

This guide is intended as an introduction to both good accessible and good usability web design for those in the OSU community planning to build a first site or considering a revision of an existing web site. It seeks to bring together the best techniques and standards for accessible design, typically found in a variety of resources and explain, in plain language, how web designers can implement these guidelines, in most cases, using simple HTML solutions. Whenever possible, guidelines are followed with real-life examples and include code-snippets for easier understanding.

The guidelines and suggestions presented here are adapted from several sources and cover OSU requirements for accessible web design as established by the OSU Web Accessibility Policies and Standards and based on Section 508 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act, as well as recommendations based on the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and usability standards supported by industry experts Jacob Nielsen and Vincent Flanders.

For more information about the guidelines referenced, including a key to the guideline symbols, see the About the Guidelines section at the end of this tutorial.

You can also view this entire tutorial on one page (HTML format, very large document) or download/print the tutorial in [PDF] format (544 kb).

Contents

• Organizing and Naming Your Site
• Layout
• Header Information
• Navigation
• Color
• Style Sheets
• Lists
• Images and Multimedia
• Image Maps
• Tables
• Forms
• Frames
• Scripts
• Timed Response
• Validating Your Site
• Key to Guidelines
• Index of standards

Start Tutorial

| View the entire tutorial in HTML format (172 kb)|

| Download/print the tutorial in [PDF] format (544 kb). |