Accessibility and HTML5

08 Aug 2012 | One-minute read


I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, but apparently forgot to hit the publish button.

So far, in my list of goals for my website refresh, we’ve seen the following

  1. HTML5
  2. Schema.org (or another microformat) annotation

Because I apparently have nothing better to do, why don’t I add on more to the mix.

  1. Accessibility

Why accessibility? Partly because accessibility has long been a side interest of mine. And partly because in some of the example sites I’ve been looking at, I kept noticing a roleattribute, but I didn’t know what is was for. I finally figured out that is comes from Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0.

From what I’ve learned so far, the basic part is to annotate the site, describing the purpose of various elements. That part should be easy.

But I’m going to go one step further, and try to make my site truly accessible, primarily for the learning experience. I will try to meet the guidelines from AnySurfer (which essentially means meeting W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. I’ll probably turn on the new theme before meeting all of their tests and may never meet them all (particularly because I don’t think edit all old content), but I’ll give it a good shot.