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Making web sites more accessible for people with disabilities, or e-accesibility as it has become known, is one of the internet's burning issues of the moment. Let's face it, there are some supposedly professionally designed web sites out there on the interweb super freeway that are so un-user friendly for visually impaired users that it makes you wonder if their inadequacy hasn't been the result special effort, or at the very least mind bending drugs.

It doesn't have to be like that, however, as there are some simple rules that Web Designers can follow to make their web sites so much more accesibile. Here are just a few:

1. Use An Accessibility Key

I mean, really, what is the point of going to all the trouble of incorporating really useful accesibility elements into the design of your web site, if the people who visit it have no idea that they're there. An Accessibility Key or Accessibility Page can be incorporated from a prominantly place link of the home page. It's where you can provide information about the accessibility of the website, what users can do and also what they can't. Acknowledging known accessibility barriers doesn't make you look like you're admitting your site is crap. It's demonstrating awareness of accessibility issues, and makes a positive statement about your organisation's commitment to the issue. So there!

2. Use Alt Text or Alt Tags

How do people with visual impairments use the internet? They use a special piece of software called a screen reader that reads allowed what it sees on the screen. Whilst sighted users can see physical images on the web page, users who are vision impaired rely on alternative text or tags being read by a screen reader so that they can understand what the image is. Alt text or alt tags should be used for all types of images, such as pictures, graphics, gifs, form buttons and graphical links, and is fundamental to accessibility. Their absence is probably the biggest barrier for visually impaired users on the internet. If you're a web designer and you deliberately ignore alt text and alt tags, you deserved to be disemboweled... using a spoon.

3. Use Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading style sheets are used to standardize how a website looks from page to page. It makes the appearance and basic layout of the all the pages look the same, and seperates the content of the page from the code that makes its look how it does. This is important, because web pages where the layout and colour scheme code is all mixed up with the

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