In João Craveiro’s blog, I’ve just found a link to a very informative article: High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization.
It makes a lot of sense, if you think about it a little. What’s accessibility? It’s making sure your blog or site is readable even to people with some kind of disability - sight, hearing, etc.. How do you do that? Consider blind people - they’ll be using a browser capable of reading text out loud. Note the “text” part. Their browser won’t interpret Javascript or anything like that, won’t show Flash animations, or read text inside images - it can, however, read the “alt” tags in those.
Have you ever tried a text browser, such as Lynx? Try browsing to your site with it. Can you still read the content? Navigate around the site? Use most or all of the options? Post new content, if the site allows it?
Because, if you can’t, neither can a blind person.
Or what about a cell phone browser? Opera 8.0 in my Nokia 6630 is almost like a “normal” browser, but what about an older version, like Opera 6.2, or even worse, the browser that came with the phone. How’s your site in it? A complete mess? Or still usable?
And now think about search engine crawlers. What do they do? They “read” the text, and follow links. Nothing more. Hmm, isn’t that a lot like what a browser for blind people does? Or a text browser?
I won’t give a list of tips here, because I’ve already mentioned a lot of them in my Blogging Tips series, and also because the linked article itself has a list of such tips. But now you know that I wasn’t just being pedantic when I said that <img> tags must have the alt=”description” part. 
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Well, in my opinion, accessibility is a lot more than that. For one, it’s not only allowing blind people to be read WHAT we can read, but also reading IN THE SAME WAY we can read — and that can be achieved.
Imagine an online newspaper, whose news’ titles were all images (as in: img elements) with the alt attribute correctly set. Is it accessible? Not quite. Sure, a blind person will be able to hear the titles, even though they’re images, but imagine that person is trying to find if the newspaper has already posted a certain article (e.g., a football match fixture); that person will have to read ALL the titles and excerpts, with the possibility of reaching the end and just saying “bah, it’s not here!” On the other hand, a sighted user would just take a 3 seconds long run on his mouse scroll wheel, just looking for a certain title. A bit unfair, uh? If headings (h1~h6 HTML elements) are used instead, the blind user can browse the page in “headings-only mode” (JAWS has it), thus emulating the sighted users’ “just look at the titles” attitude.
Just my 2¢ on why the alt attribute can be overrated to the point of mistaking some people into the thought that it’s the cornerstone of accessibility.
Hi! try this one with lynx or links… http://www.hdtondela.min-saude.pt/xyz/, I’m codinging/designing it…
Yes, i’m with Joao on this one. Alt attribute isn’t enough to make a website accessible. One thing i do need to mention is that some screenreaders actually use IE engine, therefore support javascript and read the finished page. This issue came up on a post i read a while ago, but i can’t seem to remember where. I’ll search my archives back home and try to comment back with a link.
You can use Javascript without compromising your site’s accessibility and improving its aesthetics.
Using Javascript Mike Davidson and Mark Wuben have put together a very handy and accessible technique to replace text headers (h1~h6) with fancy flash movie clips with whatever font you’d like — no need for the user to install any font file. sIFR is the name, and it’s nothing new. 3.0 is in the works. It’s a very nice way to have both the fancy fonts for headings and keep your document accessible (if javascript turned off).
This is all done after-loading, so if JS is turned off, nothing will get replaced. Pretty good fallback.
More at http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr/
Gothic, i’m getting an http error 500 accessing that with lynx. Also i see tables for layout, that can’t be good for a text-based browser.
Hey, nowhere did I say that “accessibility equals the alt attribute”! That’s just an example I gave.
What I said - and what the article said much better, though I added the “text browsers” thing - is that both search engine bots and users with disabilities “see” sites much like Lynx does, so it’s important that the site is not only readable, but - as João correctly mentions - usable in it.
WordPress tends to be good in this respect, unless you use (or create) a very weird theme. In the past, I’ve posted in my blogs with my N-Gage (Opera 6.20) and my 6630 (both Opera 8.0 and the default Nokia browser).
«Hey, nowhere did I say that “accessibility equals the alt attribute”!»
I wasn’t refering to you.
It is, though, very common among, for instance, public sector websites, to see that the only accesibility feature — despite the so-called “accessibility shield” — is the presence of alt attributes “by all means necessary” (even if that means having 4 or 5 presentational images — i.e., otherwise useless — as 4 or 5 img elements with the alt attribute set to “*”).
As for WordPress, I beat that: replying comments from a Siemens M55