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Welcome to part five of the LSNTAP series on web accessibility! I'd like to talk to
you about coding. The goal in setting up your website should
be to make it possible for assistive technologies, like screen readers, to translate your page
to something understandable for their users. The best way to do this is to keep your content
separate from all stylistic elements. You should be able to turn off all your applets,
add-ons, widgets, wing-dings, and whatever else you have and still make sense of the
site. Basically, this will come down to two simple
principles: first, write your code carefully. Don't forget simple things, like end tags,
or assistive technology will have a hard time parsing the site. Keep it simple with HTML
or CSS conventions; avoid stuff like Javascript, especially for navigation.
Second, use browser defaults! Most of the time, they're pretty good and will make it
easy for assistive technology to do its thing. All you have to do is not mess around with
them too much! That's about it on coding. Keep watching for
a discussion of operability!