Last Updated on July 19, 2015.
Designing for Visitors with Sensory Impairments
- End lists, sentences, headers with appropriate punctuation to prevent the "alt" attribute (often referred to as the "alt" tag) from running into the text that follows when read via text-to-speech or Braille.
- Use audio clips containing descriptive information.
- Place an anchor (D-link) to another page that has a text description of separate viewer-based graphics.
- Place links on individual lines.
- Use vertical lists and state how many items are in an upcoming list and number for each item.
- Have tables that degenerate appropriately.
- Do not use the refresh option since this will trigger a screen reader to restart from the top of the page.
- Do not use drop capitals because a screen reader will read different font sizes within a line as separate sentences, starting with the largest font.
- Avoid ASCII art.
- Include information about fonts, colors, and resolution.
- Make color-coding redundant (such as "bold" and "red").
- Use proportional font markups such as H1, H2, and H3.
- Test the page to see if it is readable in black and white.