Dreamweaver 8 - How to Set Accessibility and File Types/Editors

One other preference that will get in your way if you do not turn it off right now, again, edit preferences on the PC Dreamweaver preferences on the Mac is accessibility. These four little check boxes control whether Dreamweaver opens a special dialogue when you insert something to tell you that you need to add alt text and other accessibility attributes.

Now, accessibility, if you are not familiar with this is really for people who needs especial accessibility, i.e. those who are blind or seeing impaired and are using browsers that read a page to them. So, if you do not put alt text behind you images, that means a little piece of descriptive text that says what your image is or what it is about. Then somebody using that kind of browser will have no idea what that image means. This is especially important when you are adding buttons or other elements that somebody is going to have to click on in order to find more information. Alt+text is also useful to people who are surfing your site with our images turned off because they will see the words that are in your alt text in place of the image that will appear there.

Here is the challenge for me in this training video, however, and you may also find this cumbersome. If you have this checked then every time you insert something, this little warning box will come up and ask you to fill it out. I get in a habit of typing an alt text when I insert images and there are some nice reporting features in Dreamweaver that will go unchecked and make sure you did not miss any along the way.

So, I am going to use those options instead of having that warning window come up every time I insert a form, a frame, image or other media. So, if you uncheck this, then you will be able to move through this the same way I do and that little dialogue box would not get in your way either.

One last preference, I want to make sure we are on the same page here is file types editors. When you get Dreamweaver, you probably got fireworks as well and Dreamweaver assign fireworks to be the primary editor for most of your images. I like to use Photoshop and I am going to show you a couple of Photoshop tricks in this training. So, I want to make sure you are set with Photoshop as your primary editor. Now, if you do not have Photoshop, it is okay, you can use any editor for this.

To get the most out of these lessons, I want to set gif and jpeg to open Photoshop if you double click on a gif or a jpeg in Dreamweaver. First, select the gif option then choose the plus sign because you are adding an editor, click on adobe, find Photoshop. You want the exe file. If you prefer image ready, go for it but I know a lot of people especially for quick edits like you would make from within Dreamweaver prefer just to use Photoshop. Click open and notice that Photoshop now appears in the list of editors.

One last thing you have to do here, you need to make this your primary editor, otherwise, fireworks would still be the editor that opened and Photoshop would just be an option. So, to make sure that Photoshop automatically opens, you select the file type, plus sign to open it up, find the program you want, in this case, we are setting up Photoshop, exe file, open and now, the last step, select it and make it primary.

You could do the same thing with flash files, sound files; mp3 files etcetera and specify any editor you want to edit those file types from within Dreamweaver. And what happens is when you double click on that file type, it launches it in the editor. You can make any changes you want and then save and comeback to Dreamweaver. So, when you have got all the preferences the way you want them, just click okay.