Features
what is accessibility?
Many people think of web accessibility as purely making websites....
Featured Site: http://www.redsound.com
www.redsound.com
Proof that design impacts on business performance
Quite often design projects can remain fairly low priority in a....
brandid at the house of commons!
In May, brandid were invited to attend a special event at the house....
what is accessibility?
Many people think of web accessibility as purely making websites....
Featured Site: http://www.redsound.com
www.redsound.com
Proof that design impacts on business performance
Quite often design projects can remain fairly low priority in a....
brandid at the house of commons!
In May, brandid were invited to attend a special event at the house....
assistive technologiesThere are now available some very impressive "assistive technologies"; software and/or hardware that allow the disabled unrivalled access to computers, tools such as Voice Recognition, Speech synthesis (or Screen Readers) and Braille terminals. These devices rely on supplied information to the user which means the web developer must provide comprehensive underlying information which will make functions accessible.
One major requirement is to separate meaningful images, in the content of the page, from the aesthetic imagery.
To help us achieve this we can use cascading stylesheets (CSS).
CSS was released as a standard in 1996 and only allowed the formatting of textual content (fonts, bold, italic etc) to be separated from the actual content. Later versions allow more formatting styles and element positioning to be used.
The use of cascading stylesheets has only really started to become prevalent in the design community since 2001-2002, helped considerably by sites like www.csszengarden.com and various demo and tutorial sites.
These also deliver us secondary, but also very important, benefits.
CSS allows us to separate content from design. This results in cleaner content that is a lot smaller and therefore faster to download. An example is the ESPN website (http://msn.espn.go.com), who recently adopted Web standards and saved 50% on the size of an individual page, cutting down the required bandwidth by a considerable amount.
So, what are the costs of going towards an accessible Web Standard design?
The cost is usually just time. It takes a bit longer to design the site, to take into account differences between browsers interpretations of Web Standards, without stifling design.
The first version of Web Standards was released in 1999 and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Group have been working on version two ever since! However, there are de facto standards that have been adopted by a lot of accessibility designers and developers. Until then, the adoption of Web Standards still encourages good practice and will make it easier to incorporate new standards as they are released.
statistics
93% web users browsing with IE 5+ @ Jul 03 (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)
terminology you may encounter:
W3C = World Wide Web Consortium
WCAG = Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
WCAGWG = Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group
WAI = Web Accessibility Initiative
XHTML = eXtensible HyperText Markup Language
XML = eXtensible Markup Language
