Final Considerations

There are a couple of other considerations to make everything a bit easier to navigate and index. Here are some rules I think everyone should incorporate:

Use the <a title=""> tag. Using the title option gives a friendly name to your links. This pops-up when someone hovers over the link, and gives a search-engine contenxt in which to index your link. Also, if you are using an image to hyperlink, text-browsers have a friendly name to show the user.

Use the <img alt=""> tag. Similar to <a title="">, used both for indexing and text display.

There are other other guidelines in the WCAG, but I feel that these are the important ones. Everyone makes their own decisions when it comes to what guidelines to follow, but the ones in this article should put you in good standing for accessiblity and search engine optimisation.

If you want to check your site for accessibility, there is a validator at webxact.watchfire.com. I usually design to Priority 1 level, with as much Priority 2 as I can manage within my deadlines. Bear in mind that you cannot get away with 0 warnings - but this is because the validator cannot check everything, and those guides that it can't check are always shown. Just pay attention to any warnings that give you line numbers and focus your coding there.

Most of the quality and priority 1 warnings would be shown in standard X/HTML or CSS validation anyway (such setting CSS color without specifying a background-color) so there shouldn't be a great deal to fix.

If you get in to the habit of coding to these guidelines from the outset, it'll make your job a whole lot easier and your site friendlier to search engines and users with different considerations to your own.