CSS is magical stuff. In the right hands, it can transform the plainest of (well-structured) documents into a visual feast. But it’s not all fur coat and nae knickers (as my granny used to say). Here are some simple ways you can use CSS to improve the usability and accessibility of your site.

Even better, no sexy visuals will be harmed by the use of these techniques. Promise.

Nae knickers

This is less of an accessibility tip, and more of a reminder to check that you’ve got your body background colour specified.

If you’re sitting there wondering why I’m mentioning this, because it’s a really basic thing, then you might be as surprised as I was to discover that from a sample of over 200 sites checked last year, 35% of UK local authority websites were missing their body background colour.

Forgetting to specify your body background colour can lead to embarrassing gaps in coverage, which are not only unsightly, but can prevent your users reading the text on your site if they use a different operating system colour scheme.

All it needs is the following line to be added to your CSS file:

body {background-color: #fff;}

If you pair it with

color: #000;

… you’ll be assured of maintaining contrast for any areas you inadvertently forget to specify, no matter what colour scheme your user needs or prefers.

Even better, if you’ve got standard reset CSS you use, make sure that default colours for background and text are specified in it, so you’ll never be caught with your pants down. At the very least, you’ll have a white background and black text that’ll prompt you to change them to your chosen colours.

Elbow room

Paying attention to your typography is important, but it’s not just about making it look nice.

Careful use of the line-height property can make your text more readable, which helps everyone, but is particularly helpful for those with dyslexia, who use screen magnification or simply find it uncomfortable to read lots of text online.

When lines of text are too close together, it can cause the eye to skip down lines when reading, making it difficult to keep track of what you’re reading across.

So, a bit of room is good.

That said, when lines of text are too far apart, it can be just as bad, because the eye has to jump to find the next line. That not only breaks up the reading rhythm, but can make it much more difficult for those using Screen Magnification (especially at high levels of magnification) to find the beginning of the next line which follows on from the end of the line they’ve just read.

Using a line height of between 1.2 and 1.6 times normal can improve readability, and using unit-less line heights help take care of any pesky browser calculation problems.

For example:

p { font-family: "Lucida Grande", Lucida, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1em; line-height: 1.3; }

or if you want to use the shorthand version:

p { font: 1em/1.3 "Lucida Grande", Lucida, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; }

View some examples of different line-heights, based on default text size of 100%/1em.

Further reading on Unitless line-heights from Eric Meyer.

Transformers: Initial case in disguise

Nobody wants to shout at their users, but there are some occasions when you might legitimately want to use uppercase on your site.

Avoid screen-reader pronunciation weirdness (where, for example, CONTACT US would be read out as Contact U S, which is not the same thing – unless you really are offering your users the chance to contact the United States) caused by using uppercase by using title case for your text and using the often neglected text-transform property to fake uppercase.

For example:

.uppercase { text-transform: uppercase }

Don’t overdo it though, as uppercase text is harder to read than normal text, not to mention the whole SHOUTING thing.

Linky love

When it comes to accessibility, keyboard only users (which includes those who use voice recognition software) who can see just fine are often forgotten about in favour of screen reader users.

This Christmas, share the accessibility love and light up those links so all of your users can easily find their way around your site.

The link outline

AKA: the focus ring, or that dotted box that goes around links to show users where they are on the site.

The techniques below are intended to supplement this, not take the place of it. You may think it’s ugly and want to get rid of it, especially since you’re going to the effort of tarting up your links.

Don’t.

Just don’t.

The non-underlined underline

If you listen to Jacob Nielsen, every link on your site should be underlined so users know it’s a link.

You might disagree with him on this (I know I do), but if you are choosing to go with underlined links, in whatever state, then remove the default underline and replacing it with a border that’s a couple of pixels away from the text.

The underline is still there, but it’s no longer cutting off the bottom of letters with descenders (e.g., g and y) which makes it easier to read.

This is illustrated in Examples 1 and 2.

You can modify the three lines of code below to suit your own colour and border style preferences, and add it to whichever link state you like.

text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 1px #000 solid; padding-bottom: 2px;

Standing out from the crowd

Whatever way you choose to do it, you should be making sure your links stand out from the crowd of normal text which surrounds them when in their default state, and especially in their hover or focus states.

A good way of doing this is to reverse the colours when on hover or focus.

Well-focused

Everyone knows that you can use the :hover pseudo class to change the look of a link when you mouse over it, but, somewhat ironically, people who can see and use a mouse are the group who least need this extra visual clue, since the cursor handily (sorry) changes from an arrow to a hand.

So spare a thought for the non-pointing device users that visit your site and take the time to duplicate that hover look by using the :focus pseudo class.

Of course, the internets being what they are, it’s not quite that simple, and predictably, Internet Explorer is the culprit once more with it’s frustrating lack of support for :focus . Instead it applies the :active pseudo class whenever an anchor has focus.

What this means in practice is that if you want to make your links change on focus as well as on hover, you need to specify focus, hover and active.

Even better, since the look and feel necessarily has to be the same for the last three states, you can combine them into one rule.

So if you wanted to do a simple reverse of colours for a link, and put it together with the non-underline underlines from before, the code might look like this:

a:link { background: #fff; color: #000; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 1px #000 solid; padding-bottom: 2px; } a:visited { background: #fff; color: #800080; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 1px #000 solid; padding-bottom: 2px; } a:focus, a:hover, a:active { background: #000; color: #fff; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 1px #000 solid; padding-bottom: 2px; }

Example 3 shows what this looks like in practice.

Location, Location, Location

To take this example to it’s natural conclusion, you can add an id of current (or something similar) in appropriate places in your navigation, specify a full set of link styles for current, and have a navigation which, at a glance, lets users know which page or section they’re currently in.

Example navigation using location indicators.

and the source code

Conclusion

All the examples here are intended to illustrate the concepts, and should not be taken as the absolute best way to format links or style navigation bars – that’s up to you and whatever visual design you’re using at the time.

They’re also not the only things you should be doing to make your site accessible.

Above all, remember that accessibility is for life, not just for Christmas.