So I’ve been out of the loop for a while and, during that time, there have been a few good articles about web accessibility that I figured I’d link to for posterity.
If you’re web designer, you’ve probably run into several reasons why your clients don’t care about web accessibility. Even the better informed clients suffer from some myths about web standards compliance. But, if you’re good, you probably have some answers for them.
I don’t think accessible web design is hard. All you need is a little experience, some thought and a good source of tips. Take things slowly and progressively improve each facet of the site in steps:
- For example, it’s very important to embed multimedia in a standards compliant way that gracefully degrades.
- All well designed sites should have an accessibility statement. All the sites I’ve built do. My own site does.
- Improving form usability can directly or indirectly improve form accessibility if you do it right.
Well, actually sometimes Web access is hard.
I’ve recently discovered to my horror that Firefox uses number keys to allow the user to access various open tabs. This breaks my attempt to use numbers as accesskey values on many of the sites I’ve built. Accesskey has always been really messy and poorly implemented idea. Some have proposed using server-side logic to hand out customized key values for different users. It’s a kludge but maybe we don’t have any choice considering how badly the W3C dropped the ball on standards and accessibility recently.