Improve the accessibility of your charity's website

There are various steps you can take to make your charity's web content more accessible to people with disabilities. Taking these steps will ensure that your site can be accessed by anyone, including people with visual and other impairments.

A full discussion of making your website accessible is beyond the scope of this tutorial, although a detailed explanation of the steps you should take can be found on the W3C website.

Many of these steps will also improve your search engine ranking as they help search engine spiders read and understand the content on your charity's website.

Here are a few example of things you can do. You may want to skip the next few points if you don't know anything about HTML.

• Use header tags (<H1>, <H2> etc) to convey document structure. This also helps with search engine rankings, particularly if the keywords within the H1 tags are the same as the ones on the page title, and are on the anchor text of incoming links.
• Use stylesheets to create layout and presentation rather than HTML. For example, replace HTML TABLE's with CSS DIVs. The latter are more search engine friendly as they show the order of data, helping search engine spiders to index the content.
• Use the alt attribute on <IMAGE> tags. This will enable the search engine to understand what the image is displaying, and will therefore help with your ranking for that keyword.
• Identify the language of document (through the HTTP lang attribute)