I found this part of the toolkit quite interesting in that I had not given many of the issues a lot of thought in the production of web sites for my classes. While navigational issues have been a focus in order to make the site easier to use I had not spent very much time thinking about thinks like make functionality available entirely from a keyboard or providing text alternatives to images. Also, I had not put a lot of time into allowing for assistive technologies or even thinking about whether or not the content might cause the user seizures! Nonetheless, they are all pertinent issues that I will certainly see if I can make allowances for as I finish off my Moodle site for this course. I found the WAI web site to be quite helpful and found it interesting that like the Internet, this initiative has had to move from version 1.0 to 2.0 to deal with the new ways the Internet is being used. Furthermore, I found the accessibility checklist in the tool kit to be a bit of an eye opener – in particular, in regard to the use of colours and how they should not be used to convey meaning. Again, makes perfect sense, but I had not considered it.
At a very high level, three things will make a big difference, in terms of a site’s accessiblity:
1.) alt-tag for each image link that a screen reader will pick up (“a photo of a red car” for example)
2.) Not using red text, ever (difficult for visually impaired and colour blind users to consume)
3.) avoiding using Flash, since any content will not be picked up by screen readers.