From the Help Desk ... Barrier-Free Web Design

The Right to Web and Information Accessibility

While we are enjoying the convenience of a high-speed network and the availability of information from the web, have we ever thought of other people in this world who cannot access this information due to limitations in web accessibility?  These people include the visually impaired, the disabled as well as those who are using hand-held devices such as mobile telephones to access the network.

For example, the visually impaired people rely on some software to translate the text in a web page into braille which they can read with their fingers. Therefore, web pages with a lot of pictures cannot be translated into braille unless the pictures have an alternative description in text format.

It is now becoming everyone's right to have access to information on the web.  For this reason, the Hong Kong SAR Government is strongly advocating barrier-free web sites.  It is the intention of this article to raise the awareness of the HKU community to this new issue of information accessibility and to point out the guidelines for web page authoring to individual and departmental web page designers.  More references can be found in the Web Care Area of the Internet Professionals Association (iProA) web site.

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Designing Barrier-Free Web pages

Barrier-free access is mostly an issue of education and training. Techniques and tools are available to help the web author make their web pages more readable by all.  Most web development tools today provide the ability to add the extra features that are needed to ensure the broadest accessibility (such as ALT tags for graphics and logical names for elements such as frames).

Visually impaired people cannot see the image files (graphics) and therefore do not know when there are imbedded links with other information under the image files. To solve this problem, all we need to do is to put an "ALT" line in every image link, stating the "meaning" of the image.  In the example below, if we replace the line

     <IMG SRC="http://www.itservices.hku.hk/index_01.gif">
by
      <IMG SRC="http://www.itservices.hku.hk/index_01.gif  ALT="HKU Computer Centre Main Page Image">

then this problem would be largely solved.

There is a need to understand the underlying technical issue and to decide on a balance between using the latest web technology and making the information accessible to all.  For example, before using Java scripts it is necessary to understand the difference between what is cosmetic and what is functional.

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Guidelines for Making Web Pages

The Internet Professionals Association has published some guidelines for making web page accessible to visually handicapped and they are available at: I hope this article would raise the awareness of the HKU community of the issue of equal-opportunity information to all people in the world, not just to the lucky people who are not handicapped in any way whether it be a physical handicap or insufficient computer resources.

If you are a web author, please appreciate the fact that the small difference you make in your web design will be a big benefit to many people.  If you find some web sites on the HKU server which have graphics but no alternate text descriptions, please report them to the appropriate web administrator or to ithelp@hku.hk who will channel the message to the appropriate web author.