Last Updated on July 19, 2015.

Designing for Visitors with Sensory Impairments

  1. Designing accessible Web sites for people 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.
  2. Use audio clips containing descriptive information.
  3. Place an anchor (D-link) to another page that has a text description of separate viewer-based graphics.
  4. Place links on individual lines.
  5. Use vertical lists and state how many items are in an upcoming list and number for each item.
  6. Have tables that degenerate appropriately.
  7. Do not use the refresh option since this will trigger a screen reader to restart from the top of the page.
  8. 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.
  9. Avoid ASCII art.
  10. Include information about fonts, colors, and resolution.
  11. Make color-coding redundant (such as "bold" and "red").
  12. Use proportional font markups such as H1, H2, and H3.
  13. Test the page to see if it is readable in black and white.