Creating accessible web pages has never been more important than today. With the recent adoption of accessibility standards in the United States, Canada, the European Union, Australia, Japan, and Brazil, website administrators need to ensure that people with disabilities can easily access their website content. All too often, however, accessibility policies fall short or fail because technical requirements exceed the knowledge and skills of those contributing web content.

Macromedia Contribute offers a unique set of tools that allows website administrators to establish and maintain site accessibility. With accessibility directly integrated into Contribute, website administrators can now specify accessibility settings. Once these settings have been activated, website content contributors must provide text descriptions for images and identify data-table headings. In addition, as a website administrator you can also specify whether to use HTML or CSS for text formatting, making it easier for content contributors without any advanced technical knowledge meet rigorous standards (such as the Canadian Common Look and Feel Standard).

This brief document explains how to build and maintain an accessible site using Contribute, and is intended for website administrator use. We also provide a separate document for content contributors.

Selecting an Accessible Template

Macromedia Contribute allows users to create and edit pages based on Macromedia Dreamweaver templates. The first step in creating an accessible website using Contribute is making sure the templates themselves are accessible.

Templates are created and edited in Dreamweaver MX. With the powerful accessibility tools included in Dreamweaver MX, it’s easy to both ensure template accessibility and retrofit existing templates to meet accessibility standards.

Download the following files for more information and resources on authoring accessible templates in Dreamweaver MX.

dw_templates.zip (2.3 MB)

Setting Administration Options in Contribute

After you’ve set up the site, you may modify the site’s accessibility options. To make these changes, select Edit > Administer Websites, and then click the name of your site.

After you’ve entered the site password, the Administer Website dialog box appears. Select the Users permission group or other appropriate group for your site. Click the Edit Group button.

The Permission Group dialog box will appear. On the left side of the dialog box, select the Editing category. Make sure you also check the Enforce Accessibility Options box listed under Other Editing Options.

Checking the Enforce Accessibility Options box activates a prompting system for content contributors, requiring them to enter important accessibility information as they insert images and tables on a page. Worldwide accessibility policies require alternate text descriptions for images, as well as markup identifying table headers. Content contributors often either forget to add these elements or simply don’t know how. Macromedia Contribute makes adding this information easy, while helping website administrators maintain overall site accessibility.

A second set of important accessibility options fall under the Styles and Fonts category. Macromedia Contribute provides you with the option of formatting text using HTML or Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and also enables you to select the type units used to modify sizes on the page.

This feature is especially helpful for sites required to meet W3C Priority 2 checkpoints. Under these guidelines, sites must use CSS to format text and use relative units for text sizes. Sites using CSS allow visitors to replace a style sheet with one of their own that’s been tailored to meet their specific needs. A site built using relative sizes in CSS also allows site visitors with low or impaired vision to easily increase and decrease font sizes within the browser. Content contributors won’t even notice when these options are enabled, since the modification is made in the underlying HTML.

Adding Accessible Images

Once you’ve set the site accessibility preferences, Contribute will ask content contributors to provide a text description for images as they are added to the page. These helpful prompts eliminate the possibility of the designer forgetting to include text descriptions. Macromedia Contribute also prevents users from proceeding without providing a text description. With no way for contributors to bypass this option, you can rest assured that site accessibility will remain intact.

Adding Accessible Tables

When a data table is added to a page, Contribute prompts the author for information describing the table structure. The author must then identify whether a table has a row of headers, a column of headers, both row and column headers, or no headers at all. Header identification helps make tables easier to read for people using screen readers, and is also required by nearly every accessibility policy in the world. Header identification typically requires hand coding from the author. Macromedia Contribute makes creating accessible tables much easier.

Formatting Text

When a site has to meet W3C Priority 2 checkpoints, content contributors must use Cascading Style Sheets to format text. Macromedia Contribute includes options that make this process transparent for content contributors. When an author wants to modify the page font, Contribute generates the necessary CSS.

About the Author

Bob Regan is the senior product manager for accessibility at Macromedia. In that role, he works with designers, developers and engineers from around the world to communicate existing strategies for accessibility as well as develop new strategies. He works with engineers and designers within Macromedia to develop new techniques and improve the accessibility of Macromedia tools.

Bob has a Masters degree from Columbia University in Education. He is currently a doctoral student in Education at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. His dissertation research looks at accessibility policy implementation strategies.