9 CSS FOR ACCESSIBLE WEB PAGES

by Richard Rutter

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language that allows authors and users to attach styles to structured documents like HTML pages. Style sheets were designed to allow precise control of character spacing, text alignment, object position on the page, font characteristics, color, backgrounds, and so on.

When used to their greatest advantage, style sheets are defined in files completely separate from the HTML documents. By separating style from markup, authors can simplify and clean up the HTML in their documents. This means site-wide changes can be made in just one place, which should decrease maintenance and increase visual consistency across a website.

This chapter discusses the accessibility features of CSS and provides explanations and examples of how to use them. CSS benefits accessibility primarily by separating document structure from presentation, and we'll begin by looking at some examples of how that works.