Content and Structure
Your focus should be on your content since the templates will take care of the layout. As such, here are some guidelines to help make your content as accessible and usable as possible.
Headings
In the same way you outline your site as a whole to help organize the content, you should also outline each page with appropriate headings to help organize the page content. The headings should represent an accurate outline of the content.
Use heading tags to outline your content. Don't try to style your text to give the appearance of a heading. Browsers rely on the actual markup in the page to determine headings. Conversely, you shouldn't use headings just to achieve a certain visual style.
The page title that you give your page automatically becomes the <h1> heading. The first heading you use in the content editor should be an <h2>.
Benefits of using headings appropriately:
- Helps you organize your content in a logical way
- Allows people to skim the page either visually or using assistive technologies
- On mobile devices, the template will auto-generate a Table of Contents for your page based on your headings
Refer to WebAIM's site on semantic structure for more information on using headings correctly.
Links
Links should make sense when read out of context. It's also preferable to place information about the link at the beginning of the link.
- Bad example: To download our application, click here
- Good example: Download our application
Refer to WebAIM's site on links and hypertext for more information on using links correctly.
Limit File Sizes
Please be sensitive to the size of any images or files you upload. More than half of the binghamton.edu web traffic over the last 6 months was on mobile devices or tablets, where users often pay for data use. Forcing a user to load large images or download huge files makes for a bad user experience. Refer to our images or files webpages for more information on compressing these for users.
Rich Media
Refer to WebAIM's site on rich media accessibility for more information on creating accessible rich media such as:
