Accessibility

For all of us, the web is increasingly becoming a part of everyday life. We use it for finding news, shopping, paying bills, searching for jobs, entertainment, and much more. Because it now plays such a vital role, it is important that the content we put on the web be available to everybody, including those who are using assistive technologies such as screen readers or braille converters.

Freeway 5 provides a number of new features for creating accessible web sites.

Accessibility Report

There is now an Accessibility Report option on the File and Page menus. This gives helpful information about the accessibility of your web pages. Possible problems include: problems with pages (e.g. absence of a title), problems with items (e.g. issues with alt text, form items without placeholder text, too much consecutive graphic text, lack of contrast between text and background), problems with links, problems with access keys, and problems with styles (e.g. use of the blink style). Freeway also lists text phrases that have links attached so that you can check that they would make sense when read out of context by a screen reader.

To find out more about an issue that is listed in the accessibility report, hold the mouse over it to display a help tag.

Preview Options

Freeway 5 provides some options on the Preview toolbar that can help you to assess how accessible a page is. These include: an option to hide images, an option to view the page in black and white (grayscale), an option to disable JavaScript, and an option to view the page with an accessibility stylesheet.

View Options

The View menu contains two new accessibility options. View Alt Text allows you to view alt text (and hides images), while View Tab Order shows the tabbing order of form items.

Language

The Page Export pane of the Inspector palette contains an option to set the language of a page. This is helpful for screen readers. In addition, any spelling language that is assigned to text is now output.

Forms

Alt text can now be set on form items. A Fieldset Action allows related form fields to be grouped. A Form Label Action can be used to specify that an item acts as a label for a form item.

Tables

The Table Cell pane of the Inspector palette can be used to define table headers (helpful for screen readers). The Table Output pane of the Inspector palette contains a Summary field: this can be used to summarize the table's contents for the benefit of screen readers.

Access keys

Access keys can be set in the Edit Hyperlink dialog and in the Form Item Export panes of the Inspector palette. Screen readers use these to allow users to access items from the keyboard.

NB - this page describes Freeway Pro functionality. Features shown may differ in Freeway Express.