What do people think about designing to accessibility standards as laid down by the W3C? http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/accessibility.php There's a couple of threads in the archives about this, but not much. Are you aware of the W3C standards? Have you ever followed them? If not, why not?
I do. The only things I don't do though are use access keys and tab indexes since setting them requires users to learn a whole new schema for navigating through a Web site. I also use a proper source order coding style for my layouts. Header -> Menu -> Content -> Sidebar(s - if appropriate) -> Footer This, in conjunction with accessible skip links, allows people to use their tab key to navigate through the Web site if they don't have access to or otherwise can't use a mouse.
All of my pages have been W3C WCAG Level 2 and US Government Section 502 compliant for many years. At one time I was the Senior Technical Advisor (volunteer) for a team of severely disabled (mostly Deafblind and Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy) Web authors -- a most rewarding experience. I am still deeply committed to WCA. James
Easy things that Web Authors can do to dramatically enhance the Accessibility of their pages: * Provide descriptive text for all images (detailed content & function via the ALT tag or adjacent informational text) *Provide a Skip-to-Content link as the first item in the page Header (Visible or hidden) *Provide a hierarchal Site Map of page links (prominently displayed) *Ensure links make sense out of context (to insure intended navigation - avoid "Click Here" for example) *Do not rely on color to convey meaning (important for screen readers and text mode browsers) *Use proportional, rather than absolute, sizing and dimensions (% and em rather than pixels) *Design to standards (Validate Markup to insure interoperability in all User Agents) James
I had an "oops" post here -- please excuse the confusion, but, please check my page: Web Content Accessibility (WCA) James