The University of Edinburgh - Disability Code of Practice 1999 states that:
... the University will aim to ensure that in the design of official University pages for the World Wide Web, within the limits of current technology, it observes best practice as suggested by the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative. ...
The University of Edinburgh - Disability Code of Practice 1999
This policy is currently under review in the light of Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (SENDA) which states that It is unlawful to place a disabled student at a disadvantage and that the learning provider has to make reasonable adjustments to accommodate the student.
If you are responsible for developing and publishing web pages for official university websites, you will need to make sure that your website can be used by disabled users. To help you achieve this goal, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provide web content accessibility guidelines as part of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
It is recommended that you follow these guidelines and that any pages that you publish satisfy all priority 1 and 2 checkpoints.
People with different kinds of disabilities can experience difficulty using the Web due to a combination of barriers in the information on Web pages and barriers in the "user agents" (browsers, multimedia players, or assistive technologies such as screen readers or voice recognition).
You as a content developer and publisher will need to check and repair pages that contain these significant barriers.
Common accessibility problems on Web sites include:
Download PWwebspeak the talking browser and use it to test your web site. Try using the websites from your favourites with the talking browser - close your eyes and see if you understand what is going on!
Have a look at the University of Arizona Accessibility Makeover pages for an example of an inaccessible web site and how it can be repaired. Try using the inaccessible and accessible versions using PWwebspeak. Also have a look at the example of how the inaccessible and accessible web sites would be heard if read by the JAWs screen reader.
Your can use LIFT Online to generate a report highlighting accessibility issues on your website. This report will tell you if your pages contains HTML code that has failed any of the tests and whether you need to perform any manual checks.
For example: if you have an image on your page that has no alternative text attribute, the report will show an error and say "Image should have valid ALT" and if your page contains a script it will give you a warning with the following text "Scripts should be accessible". Both these messages will be hypertext links that will take you to an explanation.
The university has secured a side-wide license for LIFT online and you can register to use this service by visiting the LIFT Online registration page.
You will be able to fix most of the problems using your HTML authoring tool. In certain cases you may need edit the HTML code.
You can also buy LIFT for Dreamweaver or LIFT for FrontPage to help you repair any errors.
You should read the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
If you need to learn more about HTML code, try the w3schools tutorial on HTML.
For useful tutorials on how to fix accessibility problems, try the web accessibility in mind tutorials pages.
For general information about accessibility in higher education, visit the TechDis website.
If you want to know the legal position on acessibility, read the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001