If Target had put just a few extra hours of spit and polish into their
HTML, they might have completely avoided a costly and widely publicized lawsuit. The rest
of this chapter will explore some tactics for better real-world accessibility??”changes that
will directly benefit visitors without getting hung up on explicit WCAG compliance.
Standards-based development
As mentioned earlier, the intrinsic nature of web standards contributes greatly to accessibility.
The term web standards encapsulates many things, but is most known as the sum of
web development best practices: using valid HTML for structural markup, CSS for presentation,
and JavaScript and the DOM (Document Object Model) for enhanced functionality.
ACCESSIBILITY
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11. www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/clf2-nsi2/index-eng.asp
Valid HTML
???Valid??? HTML is the first step toward web standards, and means two important things.
First, it means that a web page has a DOCTYPE at the top of the code. This DOCTYPE tells the
user agent (usually a web browser, but could be a screen reading device or a mobile
phone) what kind of document it is about to disseminate. Second, valid markup means
that there are no mistakes in the HTML, such as unclosed tags or missing alt attributes for
images.
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