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How-to: Future proof your accessibility efforts.
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Ways to make your accessibility effort as future proof as possible. |
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Future proofing your accessibility work will help lower your development costs as well as support current and future user agents, such as assistive technologies (AT). WCAG has 2 guidelines, Parsing and Name, role, value, for futureproofing your website.
- Parsing relates to ensuring that user agents and AT are able to read and navigate your web site correctly. Validating your site using the W3C Markup Validator can help you find errors in your markup and ease the burden of the AT parsing your web page. Follow the official specifications for your markup. E.g. make sure to close open tags (
<div class="a-class">...</div>) and use unique IDs. - Name, role, and value are related to interface components and controls. By default, all standard HTML controls already meet this criteria. This guideline is mainly aimed at developers that design and/or script their own interface components and controls.
While these are only two recommendations to make your site more accessible, it should have a good spot in every web developers workflow. Use of checklists, like the one we have composed here on The Accessibility Project, can help keep you on task.