Is your website optimized for screen readers? Have you tested it lately? Many webmasters don’t take into consideration design methods that allow visitors with disabilities to easily use their website.

By refraining to follow industry guidelines, they’re completely cutting off a significant portion of the population from accessing their online presence. While there are many levels of accessibility webmasters should follow, here are my top ten tips to making your website easier to use to blind and low-vision visitors:

1. Design your website completely in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Don’t simply use CSS to adjust colors, instead, use it as your design mechanism. Do not rely on the HTML code for design. Screen readers usually ignore CSS and read the HTML that is written on the page.
2. Don’t use color as your only method to describe information. If you must provide emphases to your content, use the STRONG or EM tag, and style them appropriately in CSS.
3. Include an ALT attribute within every IMG tag. This will read the description of the image instead of skipping it. This is also very helpful for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can also use the LONGDESC attribute if the description is longer than one sentence. While we’re on this topic, avoid using Image Maps if at all possible. They can be a nightmare.
4. Properly layout HTML tables so that screen readers understand the content the way it is intended to be understood. Begin by identifying the table using the CAPTION tag for the table’s title. You can use CSS to hide this caption if necessary.
5. Add the SUMMARY attribute to the TABLE tag and thoroughly describe what the table is. While we’re on the topic of tables, try to keep them as simple as possible. The more complex they are, the more difficult it is for blind people to understand them. Also, refrain for using tables to layout a webpage. Use the DIV tag and CSS properties to design page layouts instead.
6. Use the TH tag for all table headers and the TD tag for all table columns. Ensure the TH tag has an ID attribute that corresponds with the TD tag’s HEADER attribute.
7. To make things easier to understand, use the THEAD, TBODY, and TFOOT to group rows of a table. You can also use COL and COLGROUP to group columns of a table.
8. Make sure that you use a text-equivalent for anything that is not readable by a screen reader. This includes the NOSCRIPT tag for browsers that are not compatible with JavaScript, Applets, or Flash.
9. Ensure that all form elements are properly labeled with a LABEL tag and a corresponding FOR attribute for each form element’s ID attribute.
10. Use H1 – H6 tags to organize a hierarchy for your content. Properly label all paragraphs with P tags, and ensure every page has detailed TITLE and META tags. This is also an SEO must.

Here are a few bonus tips:

• Allow navigation skipping so that blind users can skip straight to the content. You can do this by creating a bookmark with an anchor tag where the content begins and linking to that bookmark. If you do not want regular users to see the navigation skipping capability, simply surround it by a DIV tag, style it “position: relative;” and align it to -1000px to the left.
• Use the TITLE attribute wherever possible, but remember that JAWS does not read the TITLE attribute by default. It has to be manually configured by holding INSERT-V, and adjusting the clickable elements setting.
• Avoid using FRAMES and IFRAMES if at all possible.
• If you do not have a copy of JAWS, try using a text based browser to navigate around. Such browsers include: Lynx, WebFormatter, and IBM Home Page Reader.
• Another workaround is to use the Mozilla Firefox screen reader emulator: Fangs. This extension creates a textual representation of a web page similar to how the page would be read by a modern screen reader.
• If you’re testing with JAWS, make sure you’re using the proper keyboard shortcuts. The number one mistake testers make is using the TAB key to navigate around a website. JAWS utilizes hundreds of possible key combinations to browse the web, so the TAB key is not always your friend.

While this article is intended for website owners using JAWS, the content is always relevant for users with Window-Eyes, EMACS Speak, Hal, MAGic, SuperNova, and ZoomText.

Luckily, there is a way out. Here are a few tips and tricks to make your website perform better and your pages load faster:

• Combine files to reduce number of HTTP requests. Move all JavaScript and CSS into single files.
• Use CSS Sprites to reduce the number of image requests
• Add an Expires header and turn cache control ON
• GZIP JavaScript, CSS, and HTML components to optimize HTTP response
• Put Style Sheets at the top of the HEAD area
• Put all scripts at the bottom of the page, if possible
• Use the DEFER attribute in the SCRIPT tag
• Avoid using CSS expressions to dynamically set CSS properties in JavaScript
• Make JavaScript and CSS files external
• Minify all JavaScript and CSS files on production. This removes whitespace, unnecessary characters, and reduces up to 80% in file size. (YUI Compressor or JSMin can accomplish this).
• Avoid using server-side redirects
• Remove duplicate scripts (this can happen when scripts are accidently inserted twice when scripts are maintained dynamically).
• In AJAX, use GET requests rather than POST requests.
• Flush after the HEAD tag because the HTML for the head is usually easier to produce and it allows you to include any CSS and JavaScript files for the browser to start fetching in parallel while the backend is still processing.
• POST load only what’s absolutely required in order to render the page initially
• PRE load components you can take advantage of the time the browser is idle and request components (like images, styles and scripts) you’ll need in the future
• Reduce the number of DOM elements
• Minimize the number of IFRAMES
• Eliminate 404 Errors and do not create custom 404 pages.
• Eliminate unnecessary cookies, keep them as small as possible, and set them to expire appropriately
• Minimize DOM access by caching references to accessed elements, updating nodes “offline” and then add them to the tree, and avoiding the practice of fixing layout with JavaScript
• Develop smart event handlers by using event delegation. If you have 10 buttons inside a div, attach only one event handler to the div wrapper, instead of one handler for each button. Events bubble up so you’ll be able to catch the event and figure out which button it originated from.
• In CSS, avoid using @import. In Internet Explorer the @import tag is equivalent to loading the tag at the bottom of the page.
• Avoid filters such as AlphaImageLoader.
• Optimize images for smaller file size by saving files as JPG, GIF, or PNG
• Don’t scale images in HTML, use original image size only
• Make favicon.ico under 1K and set an expires header
• Keep all components (javascript/css) under 25K each

1. If you don’t have any content, don’t create the page. It’s all about content nowadays, so ditch the under construction page and pages with little or no content.
2. Make sure your website is submitted to Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Next, find someone with a good PageRank to link to you. Submit also your website to DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, and other reputable directories. Send out press releases, if necessary, and submit your articles to social bookmarking websites (ie. Digg, Slashdot, etc)
3. Create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster tools to train Google how you would like them to crawl your website. Also submit your sitemap to Ask and Yahoo.
4. Create an HTML version of your sitemap to assist other search engines in crawling your website.
5. Have one domain only. Don’t scatter your content throughout subdomains and alias’s. Have fresh and quality content and make sure it is not duplicated.
6. Target only relevant keywords in your copy, keep it dense, but not too dense. Your content should be natural to read.
7. Replace your images with plain text anywhere you can throughout your website. Text menu items, for example, are more SEO friendly than images links.
8. Include your most relevant keywords in your TITLE tag and ALT tags.
9. Keep the TITLE meta tag between 60-80 characters
10. Keep the DESCRIPTION meta tag between 160-180, about 25-30 words
11. Keep the KEYWORDS meta tag between 15-20 words maximum.
12. Optimize Pages with Headings (H1, H2, H3..) containing your site’s primary keywords.
13. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.
14. If your site contains dynamic pages(i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engines’ spiders having difficulty indexing dynamic pages.
15. Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as link farm by search engines.
16. Use Lynx as text browser to check your site. (http://lynx.isc.org/)
17. Allow search bots (good ones) to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.
18. Check your web server/host if it supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. It tells search engines whether your content has changed since last crawled your site. It will save you bandwidth, resources and avoid server overload.
19. Use Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders in indexing your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. But with bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn more about Robots.txt file.
20. Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.
21. Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engines ranking.
22. Avoid links to bad neighborhood such as web spammers, link farms, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, porn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affects your search engine rankings.
23. Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.
24. Do not use unauthorized programs or online tools to submit your site, check page rankings and other automated queries. Avoid the risk of being flagged as spam.
25. Do not use hidden text and links. Show to search engines what you show to your visitors. It will greatly affect your site’s reputation.
26. Do not attempt to create pages that contains phishing, scam, viruses, trojans, backdoors, spyware, adware and other malicious programs.
27. Make your site useful and informative.
28. Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site’s visibility, popularity and rankings. Search engines consider links as votes to your site.
29. Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link.
30. Be extra careful in purchasing SEO services. Some uses illegal and questionable ways to improve rankings.
31. Do not buy or sell links.
32. Do not create sites that contains purely affiliate links and no valuable content that are useful to the users.

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