It is unlawful to discriminate against a person with a disability by excluding access to information and services, including those delivered online.

Accessibility doesn't just apply to people with a range of disabilities, but also those with slow internet connections or who use mobile phones, portable digital assistants and other devices to access web content.

The W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the most comprehensive guidelines for ensuring that websites are accessible. They have been endorsed by Australia's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), disability groups and rural groups.

UWA's web accessibility requirements are set out in the University Web Policy.

Images

Images which are not purely decorative should be tagged with short, meaningful descriptions in the Alt-text field.

If an image of an aircraft has an Alt description of "plane", a visitor using a screen reader may not know whether the image is of a carpenter's tool, a stretch of land, an aircraft or a two-dimensional object. A better description would be "A Qantas 737 aircraft in flight".

Documents in an image-based format such as GIF or TIF and pictorial content such as graphs and maps are not accessible to people who are blind or vision-impaired and who rely on Braille or synthetic-speech to read computer screens. An alternative representation of the information, preferably as text on an HTML page, should be provided where possible.

Purely decorative images should have a blank Alt-text field (alt="")

PDF (Portable Document Format)

PDF documents are not as accessible as plain text or HTML documents.

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's view is that "organisations who distribute content only in PDF format, and who do not also make this content available in another format such as RTF, HTML, or plain text, are liable for complaints under the DDA. Where an alternative file format is provided, care should be taken to ensure that it is the same version of the content as the PDF version and that it is downloadable by the user as a single document, just as the PDF version is downloaded as a single file ."

The use of PDF documents on the University website is acceptable if accessible alternatives are provided.

Accessible design in MySource Matrix

Many accessibility aspects are dealt with automatically in the MySource Matrix CMS. These include most Priority One elements, such as:

• Validated mark-up is used for the templates and style sheets.
• Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for consistent presentation and layout of content.
• Text is used for headings and links with the only imaged text used being in the University's logotype. Site titles are embedded in the code as plain text and rendered as images by graphical browsers.
• Font size is adjustable by the web browser.
• High contrast between text and background is used for improved readability.
• Links are easily recognised, appear and behave consistently. They are blue in colour and also identified by underline and rollover behaviour to provide additional visual cues. Links which have been visited are identified by a different colour.
• Navigation menus and forms work with or without JavaScript.

However, there are some priorities which you will have to implement when creating web pages in the MySource Matrix CMS:

• Mark-up headings and lists used on your page to denote content changes.
• Provide an Alt (alternative) text description for all images.
• Insert titles to provide additional information about links.
• Use acronym, abbreviation and other tags to explain language and concepts.
• Include table headers and summaries for tables that display data.
• Label all form elements, using explicit associations with input elements and provide instructional text to help with searching and submitting data.
• Ensure the page's code is valid HTML.
• Use validation tools to check content for compliance with the W3C guidelines.