We all know accessibility is important, but precisely how does one make a website or intranet more accessible?

There is a great deal of hype on this topic and a lot of discussion too, yet vagueness and confusion persist. Web teams face a considerable amount of political pressure to ‘be compliant’, but often don’t know where to start. This can result in aggravation, misdirection of effort and ultimately a failure to make the website any more accessible.

Often what is needed is a pragmatic view based on real experience, to reveal what is really important and what should be tackled first.

This paper provides ten key tips to help improve the accessibility of any website, or intranet. It’s not intended to be an introduction to web accessibility (instead see the earlier article Introduction to web accessibility for a brief overview of the topic).

Nor is this intended to be an exhaustive manual covering every detail of every accessibility technique. Besides being counter-productive and far from helpful as a starting point, it is just not possible to do this. Best practice changes constantly and one must focus on the underlying approach rather than specific details.

These tips cover the basics, getting code quality up to scratch, for instance. Higher levels of accessibility can be explored once these sanity factors are addressed. Readers are encouraged to make use of the many links to further information sources, provided throughout this paper, from which more detail can be obtained.

[April KM Column written by Patrick Kennedy, read the full article]