Creating Accessible Web Pages with FrontPage 2002

This page covers how to make a Microsoft FrontPage 2002 Web page more accessible by providing alternatives to multimedia and minimizing the loading time. (FrontPage 2000 users see Accessibility with FrontPage 2000.) For more information on the topic of accessibility, see Microsoft's FrontPage Accessibility site. Some accessibility issues can be easily implemented through text size, page formatting, color choice and other options addressed on our pages Making an Accessible Web Site, Typography for the Web and Using Color on the Web.

Providing Alternatives to Multimedia
Multimedia means any image, video or sound that is used on your Web page. Some people do not have computers capable of displaying all forms of multimedia while others are themselves disabled and unable to experience online sounds or images.

The simplest way to implement an alternative to an image is through the use of an "alt" text. To access this feature in FrontPage, first select the image you wish to represent with alt text. From the Format menu, choose Properties. The Picture Properties dialog box appears. Go to the General tab. Under Alternative representations and after Text, enter the text you would like to appear in place of an image. Click OK.

Similar settings can be made for the use of sound and video files. When you first insert one of these plug-ins, the Plug-In Properties dialog box appears. Under Message for browsers without plug-in support, enter a description of the multimedia being played.

It is not absolutely necessary to use "alt" text. Another option would be to provide captions and descriptions of the multimedia you use. This is a better option for audio and video clips. (It would be difficult to include all lyrics or an entire script using the "alt" text).

Minimizing the Loading Time
Not all Web users have the fastest broadband connections, however, not many users are connecting with modems slower than 14.4 kbps. With this in mind, it is best to design Web pages that load quickly (around 30 seconds) for the average user (28.8 kbps is probably close). This does not necessarily mean keeping pages short, because even pages that scroll down for 10 or 20 pages can load quickly if they are mostly text. On the other hand, a page that only takes up one screen and is crowded with images can take well over 30 seconds to load. Using less images or splitting larger pages into 2 or 3 smaller pages can help with this problem. Minimizing the file size of an image will also help to speed up load times. FrontPage allows you to do this. To illustrate this point, let's first look at two images.

Both images are from the same file, but the one on the right was resized to half its size. You might expect the larger image will take longer to load, but this is not the case. The smaller image is first loaded as the default size, and then the browser adjusts it to half the size. To change the default size, use the Resample option in FrontPage.

After an image has been resized in FrontPage, you can automatically save it as the smaller size by clicking the Resample button on the Pictures toolbar.

This is not necessarily the best way to optimize an image, but one that is simple to use and a part of FrontPage.