Web Developers have always wondered why they should validate their websites to W3C. Some Web Developers don’t care to validate in W3C and others live by if. Personally you should validate your website in W3C. Having a good coding style and using W3C will make your site more accessible to disability individuals. And will keep you with the technological advancement for development.

What Does W3C Stand For?

The World Wide Web Consortium or W3C, have been put together a precise way to code a site to make it accessible to disability individuals. There a number of individuals that are diagnosed with a disability that uses the internet. Disability individuals might have small desktop resolutions (800 x 600), keyboard navigation or a screen reader. These tools will to help their usability with the content and navigation on the site.

W3C Standards is Easy

With W3C Standards coding your website in W3C isn’t hard, nor isn’t any more work than not coding in W3C. There are some areas you need to consider.

Use Alt Tags and Closing Tags for all Images

Such as your img tags needs to have an “alt” tag with them. An alt tag is a small description about the image. This alt tag is used by the web browser to describe the image in text form or a description when an image isn’t displayed. When a web browser cannot find an image it will display the alt tag in its place. Also close the image tag with a />

Why do I need alt tags when I know my images are not broken? This is where the accessibility issue comes into play. Let’s make a scenario: An individual that is blind is surfing the Internet. He needs to use a screen reader to help him find links and read content. When he comes across an image without alt tags, the screen reader has no description to read. Now he doesn’t know what he clicking on. If there was a small description alt tag included in the image he would know exactly what it is.

Close All HTML Attribute and Element Brackets

Closing all attributes and tags is another common mistake for W3C. If you have a p and a b html tag. You need to close the b tag before the p tag.

Double Checks the Small Stuff

Another to watch for is putting your DOCTYPE, Content-Type and Title tag. But as a web developer you are already doing this, so you don’t need a reminder. Just always run your site through the W3C Validator Service to see if you have any errors.

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