HTML

HTML and its related technologies, like XHTML and CSS, offer the most flexibility in terms of support on different devices and platforms and support for people with disabilities.

• It is viewable on a multitude of devices.
• It provides an easy way to create rich semantics to describe Web pages.
• It can be transformed into other formats to meet people’s individual needs.
• Content can readily be made accessible.
• Even though HTML offers the highest level of accessibility support, there are certain technologies that must be implemented with care to ensure accessibility.
• Some technologies such as JavaScript can be made quite accessible, but additional planning is needed.
• Newer HTML technologies such as the canvas element have a number of accessibility challenges that are not fully solved.

Several applications have options to “Save as HTML” or “Publish to Web”. Accessibility support in features like this is shaky at best. In general these export and conversion options should be avoided in favor of using authoring tools designed to create accessible HTML.

Content Management Systems (CMS) help you manage large HTML sites. These tools will automatically generate a lot of your HTML code for you. Some of these systems create accessible HTML content and some do not. In general Drupal and WordPress can produce some very accessible content, however, even in these systems, additional work will need to be done to ensure the content is accessible in all cases.

Techniques for creating HTML accessible content are given later in this guide.