Is your Web site accessible by people with disabilities? Here's a checklist of things to do to ensure your Web site is available to all.

• Author: Sturm, Sandi

Imagine yourself sitting at your computer, eyes closed, and no mouse to use for navigation. You see no graphic images or text with the familiar underline denoting a link. Information is transferred to you via "screen reader" technology, which reads text in a mechanical tone reminiscent of HAL the talking computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You are one of the 750,000 blind persons known to be living in the U.S. Each year 50,000 more become visually impaired.

The Internet has created a new and valuable source of information for people with disabilities, but not all Web sites are accessible. Is yours?

THE PROBLEMS

"E-commerce sites are probably some of the worst violators of accessible design," says Kent Ireton, blind services program coordinator for the Alaska Division of Vocational Rehabilitation.

Ireton has observed blind Internet users moving from site to site, never complaining about inaccessibility. They just move on to another Web site. As a business owner or creator of information, why design a site that turns people away?

In Alaska, there are an estimated 10,000 residents 16 years and older who are visually impaired. There are another 73,000 who are classified as disabled.

Everyone who wants or needs to access your information may not be able to. A common problem for visually impaired users is the use of graphics to convey words or ideas without text alternatives. Important messages could be missed with the user never knowing it existed.

The use of frames and tables can lead a "screen reader" in wrong directions, resulting in confused bits of information being transmitted to someone who cannot visualize the screen.

Creating an accessible Web site not only makes good business sense, it has been a law since 1998. The Americans with Disabilities Act Section 508 requires state and local governments and the business sector to provide effective communication to include people with disabilities. (For more details go to www.section508.gov.)

How do you correct the problem?

Before Section 508 became law, an international body known as the WWW Consortium (W3C) created the Web Content Access Guidelines. A sampling of these guidelines is shown here.

Images and animations: Use the "alt" attribute to describe the function of each visual.

This is the text that appears when you roll the curser over an image. For the visually impaired using a screen reader, the picture would read "image" if no alt text is created.

Image maps: Use the clientside map...