The Prime Directive: Equivalent Alternatives for Maximum Accessibility
The “prime directive” of Web accessibility—the number-one item in both WCAG 1.0 and the Section 508 federal accessibility standards that took effect in June 2001—is the requirement to provide “equivalent alternatives” for visual and auditory elements of the Web site. In this chapter, to explore what that means, we begin at the beginning. We start with ALT text, then move on to other kinds of text equivalents; finally, we briefly discuss uses of other media as alternatives to text.
HTML Elements and Attributes Addressed in This Chapter
Elements
<img>, <area>, <script>, <applet>
Attributes
alt, src, longdesc, width, height
Accessibility Checkpoints and Standards Addressed ...
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