The way the text is layed out on the page can determine if the pages are
accessible or not. Here are some things to consider.
Make sure your text reads properly from upper-left to lower-right. Try
viewing
it with Lynx and reading it out loud to see how well it reads, as that's
how completely blind people will hear it.
Place navigation buttons in the same location on every page. This
makes it easier for people with vision problems to find the buttons.
Do not interfere with the standard navigation buttons, like the "back"
button. For example, sites sometimes use the "<meta>"
tag to automatically forward visitors to another page. The "back" button
then puts you back to the page that automatically forwards you again,
making it almost impossible to go back several pages. This causes problems
for people with mobility difficulties because they cannot click "back"
fast enough to get past the forwarding page. It's also really annoying for
everyone else. (A better way to forward people to new pages is using the
Apache web server's ".htaccess" file.
Use a clear convention to identify what a "link" is on a page so blind
people can audibly distinguish links from ordinary text. One solution may
be to put a link near the beginning of your document that goes to a page
containing only a list of all the links on the page, so blind people can
quickly navigate the page.
Create "hotkeys" to go to specific links or form entries. This is done
with the "accesskey=" attribute of the
<a>,
<label>,
and
<legend>
tags. For example:
<a href="http://www.usask.ca/" accesskey="U">U of S</a>
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