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Web Accessibility

Improving web accessibility

For many people with disabilities, surfing the web is a frustrating experience, filled with obstacles to understanding and use. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), in cooperation with organizations around the world, is committed to removing accessibility barriers for all people with disabilities — including the deaf, blind, physically challenged, and cognitive or visually impaired.

The WAI has published a set of Web Accessibility Guidelines for web authors and developers to help make web pages more accessible to people with disabilities. These guidelines explain how to code HTML pages so that the content will be accessible to screen readers and other types of assistive devices.

Who is Bobby?

Did you notice this Bobby Approved stamp on our Home page? Bobby is a web-based tool that analyzes web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities. Bobby uses the WAI guidelines to perform accessibility testing and checks for three levels of problems that hinder accessibility:

• Priority 1 problems seriously affect the page's usability by people with disabilities. These problems can prevent some groups of users from accessing the page.

• Priority 2 problems are access problems which you should try to fix. These problems do not prevent access, but may make access difficult for some groups of users.

• Priority 3 problems are lesser problems which you should also consider. These problems do not prevent access, but may make access difficult for some groups of users.

A Bobby Approved rating is granted to a site in which none of the pages have Priority 1 accessibility errors. Most pages on the Massachusetts Council of Churches site passed Bobby's test to earn a Bobby Approved stamp. However, PDF documents were not tested by Bobby, although they also may be in compliance with accessibility guidelines.

For more information about making your web pages accessible, see the resources listed below.

Resources

For more information, see the following resources: