Creating accessible themes

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This guide provides you a description of accessibility with best practices for theme developers.

Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities. When the sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users can have equal access for information and functionality.

The W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Introduction to Web Accessibility says Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web. More specifically, Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and they can contribute to the Web. Web accessibility give benefits to others, including older people with changing abilities due to aging.

Accessibility principles

This is a Drupal-centric version of Principles of Accessible Design, part of the Introduction to Web Accessibility by WebAIM.org.

Building accessible forms

The following tips will improve the accessibility of your forms:

Contributed modules to help with accessibility

A list of modules that can help improve the accessibility of your site.

Creating accessible site and page navigation

This page provides an overview of best practices for making page and site navigation more accessible.

Creating accessible structure and markup

This page provides information on accessibility issues with structure, markup, data tables and page navigation

Getting started with accessibility

Because she is amazing, Ann McMeekin has prepared for us a guide to designing accessibility into themes - it's useful far beyond this

Hide content properly

This page covers major techniques for hiding content for all users and users with screen readers.

Improving readability with fonts and typography

Type on the web must have a high level of readability. Readability is a measure of how easily words, phrases and blocks of copy can be read.

Maintaining accessibility in rich Internet applications and Javascript/Ajax features

The following guidelines will help with building rich Internet applications

Managing images and media for accessibility

For most of us it would be hard to understand the web without images, audio, video and new interactive media. However, much of that

Providing Useful Alternative Text for Images

For screen reader users and SEO, it is important to put in alternative text for images that convey the meaning that the visual represents.

Providing a way to skip navigation

Skip navigation links are one of the easiest ways to quickly improve the accessibility of your site. Skip links allow site visitors to jump

Specifying colors and contrast for accessibility

According to Vischeck, "Roughly 1 in 20 people have some sort of color vision deficiency." Having sufficient contrast between the text color

Tools for validating accessibility

This page discusses two types of validation:

Using headings to improve accessibility

Headings allow screen-reader and assistive technology users to skim the structure of a page and navigate to or skip over sections.