Things Developers Should Do For Web Accessibility

"Use alt tags where appropriate"<p>When you don't have need of an alt attribute, add one but keep it empty. In the absence of an alt attribute some screen readers will read out the path of the image instead. Setting it to empty allows you to remove this, almost always, unnecessary noise.

The mention of Fangs alone made this article valuable to me. Accessibility has had lots of lip service for years but it is essentially impossible to do any legitimate work optimizing for screen readers if you don't have access to them (being prohibitively expensive.) It's like writing for a browser you never get to test in. If anyone was serious about accessibility they should get simply get screen readers in the hands of the people building web sites.

Number 1 (and throughout the article) isn't right, the input should go <i>inside</i> the label.<p>See <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Element/input" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Element/input</a> Permitted content: None, this is a void element.<p>And <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Element/label" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Element/label</a> for an example of doing it correctly

Number 2 is simply misleading. It doesn't take in consideration HTML 5 Document Outline speification. It's not enough anymore to simply use h1-6 accordingly. You must take the whole document landing marks sructure in account (`article`, `section` etcetera.)<p>Number 8 is not completely correct anymore. Javascript was recently included in the accessible tecnologies. Screen readers nowadays do own a DOM and a full rendering stack. ARIA, in fact, dictates a lot of interesting accessibility states and tools. That said, I do not push forward the use of javascript for structural functionalities, the rule that states that "Javascript is an enhancement" still works and will always work, but excluding enhancements for accessibility is naïve as far as the naïvete of the implementation.

0) Make sure all of your HTML is valid.

Regarding JavaScript: some JS-heavy apps can be made accessible easier than it looks at the first sight. One just needs to use &#60;input&#62; and &#60;button&#62; or &#60;a&#62; for binding 'onclick' events, instead of &#60;div&#62;s, &#60;span&#62;s etc. [1] and perhaps add some additional code to handle quirks in some browsers.<p>[1] [shameless self-promotion] <a href="http://jakub-g.github.com/accessibility/onclick/" rel="nofollow">http://jakub-g.github.com/accessibility/onclick/</a> - comprehensive cross-browser study of 'onclick' handling from JavaScript