Web Publishing Hints

The University of Wisconsin - Rock County has standards for Electronic Publishing. Please read: Electronic Publishing Policies

The following provides some guidelines and suggestions which will help your web pages meet these policies.

Also view the Web Developers' Corner for more hints and information

Alternate Text Tags on ALL Images

Whenever you insert an image into a webpage, you must edit the PICTURE PROPERTIES to provide an image caption. Users who are visually impaired may not be able to see (or clearly discern) your image - and therefore, you must put a text caption "beneath" your image using the IMG ALT tags. The way to do this using Microsoft FrontPage is as follows:

1) Insert your image

2) Right-Mouse-Click on your image, and select Properties from the pop-up menu.

3) Click on the GENERAL file-tab in the Picture Properties dialog screen, and go to the section labeled ALTERNATIVE REPRESENTATIONS. In that field for TEXT - enter in your caption information. A screenshot showing this follows.

Screen Shot showing Picture Properties dialog to enter in ALT TEXT on web images

Only Use Styles Menu

Screenshot of Frontpage Styles drop-down box location

When editing your web page, use the DEFAULT font and format your page look ONLY using the drop-down styles menu. These styles are pre-formatted and utilize style-sheets that are specifically designed to be compliant with Section 508 and W3C Accessibility Guidelines. You should also keep the font SIZE set at NORMAL. This will allow the user to dynamically size the fonts to accommodate their eyesight and monitor size.

No Animations

Any moving feature of your webpage requires a long-description explanation of what is happening in the animation, and also should have a voice-narration that is timed in sync with the actions in the narration. If you wish to have an animation feature on your webpage, then you will be required to provide these additional files to make your page compliant.

Additionally - it should be noted that animations typically use large amounts of campus bandwidth, which increases the costs to our campus and depletes monies that could otherwise be spent for classroom and student technologies.

No Use of Colors to Convey Information

It is important to be careful and precise with language, remembering that some users cannot actually see your webpage (and must listen to it or interpret it with a Braille device). For instance, telling users to click on the "red" button or the bold link will have no meaning to someone who cannot interpret colors.

One way to avoid difficulties is to ONLY use the standard STYLES provided in the formatting drop-down of FrontPage and to not refer to colors in any directions to users.