Checkpoints by Priority

Guidelines

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Guideline 13. Provide clear navigation mechanisms.

Checkpoint 13.2 - Provide metadata to add semantic information to pages and sites

Metadata is used to provide additional data about the page to the user.

How do I do it?

This can involve using Title, Meta, Address, Link and RDF tags. The Title tag is mandatory as it provides information regarding the page content. Meta tags can include keywords and description information for search engine optimisation, and name, copyright and date information about the page. The address tag can also contain contact information. Links tags are dealt with in checkpoint 13.9. RDF (Resource Description Framework) tags can also be used to provide title, author, date, copyright and licensing information for XML documents.

A metadata sample is shown for a HTML document. Simply insert your own information for each site.

html

 <title>Accessible 
        Ireland</title>

        <meta name="author" 
        content="Vivienne 
        Trulock">

        <meta name="copyright" 
        content="&copy; 
        2005 ilikecake">

        <meta name="keywords" 
        content="accessible, 
        website, design, web design, dublin, ilikecake, accessible web, ireland, 
        webxact, manual checks, automatic checks, user checks, wcag 1.0, w3c, 
        wai, accessibility, vivienne trulock">

        <meta name="description" 
        content="accessible 
        web design how to tips and techniques for w3c wai wcag 1.0">

        <meta name="date" 
        content="2005-11-22">

        <link href="../style.css" 
        rel="stylesheet" 
        type="text/css"> 
        

Xhtml

<title>Accessible Ireland</title>
<meta name="author" content="Vivienne Trulock" />
<meta name="copyright" content="© 2005 ilikecake" />
<meta name="keywords" content="accessible, website, design, web design, dublin, ilikecake, accessible web, ireland, webxact, manual checks, automatic checks, user checks, wcag 1.0, w3c, wai, accessibility, vivienne trulock" />
<meta name="description" content="accessible web design how to tips and techniques for w3c wai wcag 1.0" />
<meta name="date" content="2005-11-22" />
<link href="../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

How do I check that it meets the WCAG criteria?

As the only mandatory tag is the <title> tag, this will be checked for using the Edit > Find tool in Dreamweaver, searching for ‘<title’. Pages which do not have a title tag will fail the check.

Where <meta> tags are used, the attribute ‘http-equiv="refresh"’ is forbidden. Where this is found the page will fail the check.

Related Links:

Metadata (w3c)

guideline 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14

Understanding Accessibility