Jedadiah Ashford
1/19/2008
We Accessibility Report #1

Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content

This report was to teach us that we need to provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content.  Some people, through disabilities, cannot view content on web pages that we create. There are also others who cannot listen to content on web pages as others do. This can create problems, especially when the user wants to view these pages and services. We are told to make sure that we give text descriptions for all visual content. This means ALL, bullets, numbering, anything that is not text needs a text description.  Now why don’t we see web pages with text all over it? The reason is that we can use special tags, that the user does not see that we can imbed into out html and give it a text description. This can be accomplished by adding the tag longdesc=”file.path” to the image tag. If the image is a graph or chart that needs to have a longer description than the ALT command can provide then the longdesc tag can link the picture to another page that has the table in a text format for those that cannot see the image. This can be applied to any image on the page.

The article also states that we need text equivalents for all videos and audio on the page. This is important to those who need the video content but cannot see it. This can be done with multiple links following or proceeding the media mentioned.

For image maps, there must be redundant links with the image. This means that there must be the same links somewhere near the image that also link to the same links that are mapped in the image. This is redundant but the user may not be able to see the image and therefore cannot click on any of the links. These can just be normal text-based links below the image.

There must be an auditory track for visual content. This must be a summary of the visual content so they can be able to understand what the visual content is about if unable to view the visual tracks on the page. The audio track must be synchronized with the visual track.

These all can provide a more complete website to those that cannot access the internet as we all do. This will provide a stronger base of viewers and customers the website that incorporates these guidelines.

Original links:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/#tech-client-side-maps
http://itssupport.uwlax.edu/webaccess/LONGDESC_HTML/Longdesc_slide.html -LONGDESC