Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #120705

Sandra Clark, Health Information Technology Group, The Constella Group, 10401 Fernwood Road, Suite 200, Bethesda, MD 20817-1110, 301-571-0240, sclark@constellagroup.com

While knowing about the laws and requirements of Web based accessibility is a good first step, the ability to transcend that and actually create an accessible Web interface for information dissemination is information not only for Web page designers, but also for the content authors themselves.

When creating information for the internet, thought must go into how the content is structured to provide meaning before deciding how to visually present information. Semantic, or structural markup requires that content providers assign proper relationships between the information they want to convey and the symbols that are used. Since more and more people are retrieving information from the Internet through devices other than traditional visual browsers, providing a properly structured document allows for the actual meaning of a document to come through regardless of the method used to retrieve it.

This presentation will focus on providing designers and content authors with the benefits derived from creating a document that is well structured and semantically marked up as well as practical methods to achieve this goal

Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of this session participants will be able to

• Identify the benefits of separating content from presentation in markup.
• Identify structure in their content.
• Create a document that is well structured and semantically correct.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.

Recorded presentation