IT Accessibility Curriculum and Resources

Eating the Elephant — "The 10 that gets you 90"

Lesson Plan

OBJECTIVE: The learner will list three tasks that can be applied to a web site to maximize the value for the effort.

SET: Your web site now is likely very large. Think back to the time you were just starting on your web site. How did you start? How did your site become large?

TEACHING POINTS:

1. What "eating the elephant" means

   1. Tackling a large project one little task at a time.

   2. You "eat the elephant" one bite at a time.

2. Where to focus your efforts: "The 10 that gets you 90" (Overview) — 15 min.

   1. Using the ALT and TITLE attributes for all graphics, graphic buttons and images

   2. Concentrate on navigation

   3. Handling bullets and spacer graphics

   4. Locate your "top ten" pages and make them completely accessible — e.g., your home page and your top level menu pages; the pages most frequently accessed by your visitors

   5. Label your "format only" tables accordingly using the SUMMARY attribute

3. Tools to help

   1. Bobby

   2. Dreamweaver & Macromedia's Accessibility Extension

   3. Lynx

   4. HTML Tidy

   5. Doctor HTML

4. Introduction of case study: "Broken" web site; problems identification and description

   1. Static pages

   2. Dynamic pages (forms & database)

   3. Multimedia

ACTIVE PARTICIPATION: Rather than lecture, solicit suggestions from the audience for attacking their own web site. An audience with any experience should come up with a pretty good list. Then the instructor should fill in the gaps.

CLOSURE: The students spend two minutes writing an action plan for attacking their local web site. The action plan consists of the three things they plan to do first.

MATERIALS:

• PC, projector
• Power Point presentation
• Web site case study

To access Lesson Plan as a Microsoft® Word document: Eating_the_Elephant_Lesson_Plan.doc

Back to Section Table of Contents
Back to Curriculum Table of Contents