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Knowledge about accessibility

To begin developing accessible websites, some basic knowledge about the required tools and techniques is needed. The chapters in this 3rd part of our guide, the Knowledge part, will support you to get acquainted with various important topics of rather theoretical nature - with high practical value though. They will prepare you to actively dive into the world of accessible website development.

To be able to ensure accessibility of your websites, you need to understand how its visitors use them, and what you have to pay attention to when optimising your websites for their specific needs.

You may find it surprising that the first thing we will be talking about is explaining our good old friend, plain traditional HTML. You may feel that being a serious senior full stack web developer, this topic truly would not offer anything new to you. But acknowledging the fact that most accessibility problems are the result of just bad HTML, you may be surprised about the information value we provide you here. It will most certainly change the way you look at HTML.

Then, while it may be the most natural thing in the world for you to read a website on a traditional screen and control it using a mouse and keyboard, you may not be familiar with alternative devices that surprisingly many users worldwide rely on. So, get the fundamentals of those: how they work, how they are commonly used, and what you have to pay attention to when providing support for them.

How to go through this part

First of all, before you continue reading, be sure you have gone through the previous parts already:

We recommend reading all chapters of the current part thoroughly without exception, even when you may feel like you are knowing certain topics inside out. Accessibility is a topic full of misunderstandings, half-truths, and technical peculiarities. Our guide aims to provide fool-proof knowledge that should finally give answers to the most relevant questions.

You should stick to the sequential order of the chapters, as they build up on each other. So we neither recommend jumping extensively between the parts of this guide, nor between each parts' chapters. To support the sequential reading flow, we generally do not offer links pointing "outside" the current chapter (except for some rare, well justified cases).