Establish site accessibility for content contributors

August 10, 2003/Creating accessible web pages has never been more important than it is today. With the recent adoption of accessibility standards in the United States, Canada, the European Union, Australia, and Japan, website administrators must ensure that people with disabilities can easily access their website content. All too often, however, accessibility policies fall short or fail because technical requirements exceed the knowledge and skills of the authors of web content.

Macromedia Contribute offers a unique set of tools that allows website administrators to establish and maintain site accessibility. With accessibility directly integrated into Contribute, website administrators can now specify accessibility settings. Once these settings have been activated, website content contributors must provide text descriptions for images and identify data-table headings. In addition, website administrators can specify whether to use HTML or CSS for text formatting, making it easier for content contributors without any advanced technical knowledge to meet rigorous accessibility standards such as the Canadian Common Look and Feel Standard.

Now anyone can easily update, add, and publish content to existing websites without knowing HTML.

Macromedia Contribute 2.0 Accessibility Features

Authoring for accessibility

Accessibility prompts

Macromedia Contribute prompts users to provide accessibility information at the same time that they insert content on the page. As content contributors add images and tables, Contribute asks them to supply the necessary description and header information, thus eliminating the need to open dialog boxes to find the appropriate fields. By making it easy to provide the necessary information, Contributes makes it more likely that the content will be accessible.

Accessible Templates

Macromedia Contribute enables website administrators to provide content authors with a specific set of accessible templates. Content contributors may then be assigned privileges to author new pages from those templates only. By starting with accessible templates, content authors have a much better chance of building accessible pages. If the website administrator does not have any accessible templates, Contribute even comes with a few of its own.

Formatting Text

Websites that meet W3C Priority 2 checkpoints provide enhanced flexibility and power to view content for users with disabilities. Increasingly, accessibility policies require the use of CSS. Macromedia Contribute allows the website administrator to change the text formatting from HTML to CSS. This change is not apparent to the content contributor, as the font, text size, and bold and italics formatting tools remain exactly the same. This feature significantly reduces the training requirements for creating accessible pages using CSS.

Accessible Workspace

Macromedia Contribute is in itself an accessible authoring tool. For content authors with disabilities, Contribute is an ideal tool for creating, maintaining, and editing web content. It is compatible with popular screen readers such as JAWS and Window-Eyes. In addition, Contribute allows users to activate all options using the keyboard.

Learn more about the accessibility features of Contribute 2.0 with the following link:

Macromedia Worldwide Store

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