AccessComputing

HTML tables were originally intended to be used for presenting tabular data, not for layout. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C®) discourages use of tables for layout because they are striving for a web in which content and structure are completely separate from presentation. This allows content to be rendered meaningfully across a wide variety of devices. In the W3C's world view, cascading style sheets (CSS) is the vehicle by which presentation and layout are defined.

Most Web users today, including screen reader users, have JavaScript enabled in their browsers. WebAIM, in their fifth Screen Reader User Survey (2014) found that 97.6% of survey respondents had JavaScript enabled. This is a solid majority of users, but not all users.

With CSS, navigational menus can appear visually at the top of a document, despite their location at the bottom of the document in the HTML source code. This technique is gaining popularity because by placing the main content first in the document's source code, websites can potentially attain better search engine placement. This technique also eliminates the need for a "skip navigation" link, since screen readers don't read the navigation links until the end. However, it creates the opposite problem: The need for an efficient means of jumping quickly to the navigation system.

"Skip navigation" links are same-page links that allow users to skip past redundant navigational links that often appear across the top and/or down the left side of websites. For an overview of these links, see the AccessIT Knowledge Base article What is a "skip navigation" link?.

The Quick Reference Guide to Section 508 Resource Documents provides information to assist government agencies in making informed decisions about electronic and information technology (E&IT) acquisitions to assure Section 508 compliance.

In HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the "longdesc" attribute was specifically designed to allow for long descriptions of complex images. This contrasts with the "alt" attribute, which describes relatively simple images using a minimal amount of text. The "longdesc" attribute allows authors to link to a separate page (for example, longdesc="https://www.washington.edu/doit/img1description.html") in which the image is described in detail. This is particularly useful for complex images such as graphs and charts.

There is a growing trend on websites in education and elsewhere toward providing a navigational system that includes dynamic menus, menus that expand as users point to them with the mouse. Proponents of dynamic menus argue that they reduce page clutter and provide a familiar, organized interface to a website, comparable to that of most software applications.

The following sampling of online resources includes both websites and discussion lists related to accessible information technology. Many of the websites listed include online courses and/or tutorials.

Websites

DO-IT
Resources on electronic and information technology, postsecondary education, and careers for people with disabilities.

In most cases of discrimination on the basis of disability in a postsecondary institution, and certainly in web accessibility cases, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (§504) and the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008 (ADAAA) will be appropriate avenues for bringing a complaint. The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has responsibility for enforcing both these federal laws in public educational settings and would hear a complaint regarding inaccessible websites.

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, as amended in 1998, requires federal agencies to ensure accessibility of software (and other electronic and information technology) that it develops, procures, maintains, or uses. The Access Board published a set of standards to support Section 508. The final standards document, Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards, includes a "Software Applications and Operating Systems" section.