Quick Retrofit Tips for Dreamweaver

Site Wide Automatic Changes

Use Modify—'Convert tables to layers' to change a table based layout to a CSS based layout.

Change bold and italics tags to strong and em. Edit—Find/Replace, Find in Entire Current Local Site, Search Source Code, Replace <b> and </b> with <strong> and </strong>, <i> and </i> with <em> and </em> (for screen reader use).

You can use the Search—Specific Tags control panel to remove font tags, and replace large size font tags with header tags. For instance, find size 6 fonts and replace with h2. It is recommended to remove all font tags and use CSS for formatting.

To check for missing alt tags, run a site report. Site—Reports, check for missing alt-text.

You can also clean up your site by removing nested and redundant tags.

More Specific Changes

Remove .doc, .excel, .ppt, and .pdf documents and provide the content in html. If the file cannot be produced as html, make sure the content provided is accessible.

Search your site for phrases like “Click here” using the Find/Replace utility.

Declare a language in the document html code (EN) for screen reader interpretation of text.

Create skip links to jump over the navigation to the main content of your web page.

Make sure the website is usable printed in black and white, and without the CSS styles.

Provide text transcripts or descriptions for audio clips, and captions for video.

Provide a link to any needed plug-in (for instance, Flash or Acrobat Reader).

Provide titles for framesets, labels for forms, and extensive markup for data tables.

Make font sizes relative in CSS.

Last, run the website through an accessibility checker to see what other problems may exist, and tackle the easiest problems first.