Exercise: Making a websites that uses frames accessible
The tutorial website includes a version of the site that uses frames (/tutorial/frames/frames.html)
- a. View the Frames version of the site with a graphical web browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape.
- b. View the Frames version of the site using a text only browser such as Lynx if you have access to it, otherwise view the page in the web based Lynx Viewer.
(The tutorial website can also be found at www.scotconnect.com/tutorial/frames/frames.html)
Note any issues you see in the Lynx Viewer as compared to the graphics version of the site.
Open the file /frames/frames.html in your text editor. This file is simply used to set up the references to the frames for the site:
<html>
<head>
<title>Main page</title>
</head>
<frameset cols="20%, 80%">
<frame src="navigation.html" name="left_frame">
<frame src="framecontent.html" name="right_frame">
</frameset>
<html>
The frame elements in the code example do not contain the title attribute. When viewed in a text-only browser such as Lynx the name attribute of the frame tag is used as the link text to each frame.
As the link based on the frame tag name does not contain useful information for visitors to the site, a title attribute should be added.
Edit the tutorial file /frames/index.html and add appropriate title attributes to the frame tags, as shown in the example below,
<html>
<head>
<title>Main page</title>
</head>
<frameset cols="20%, 80%">
<frame src="navigation.html"
title="Site navigation"
name="left_frame">
<frame src="framecontent.html"
title="Content page for photographer Joe Light"
name="right_frame">
</frameset>
<html>
If you cannot explain the purpose of the frames in a few words you can use the longdesc attribute to link to a page with a longer explanation. If you only have a couple of frames this would not be particularly useful, as you are looking at one page to find out if you want to look at another page. If you have many it becomes more useful as it could be used to describe the function of each frame.