Website Accessibility
For me there are three things that make me want to trumpet the web accessibility cause. firstly and posibly selfishly is my professional pride. I think any developer who has worked with propper compliant XHTML and CSS for doing layouts and positioning would agree that removing HTML tables from the mix makes your life 1000 times easier in the long run.
Second is that knowing what disabled people go through on a daily basis to do the most trivial of things. my mother in law elect is in a heavy electric wheelchair when she travels any distance and the thing is VERY heavy and cant be lifted. every time we want to go for a meal or just go out for the evening with the in laws we have to plan the whole event to the smallest detail. suddenly popping out for a pizza turns in to a major millatary operation.
Third of course is the law, since 1999 it has been illegal in the UK to discriminate against disabled people with regards to service provision. last month (OCT - 2004) changes in the Disability Discrimination Act mean that disabled people can now claim compensation from or even sue service providers that fail to make reasonable Adjustments to ensure impaired people can access there services.
The law was originaly intended to make access to places like banks and super markets etc easier for people in wheelchairs it does however cover any service that may be provided to the public.
Basicly in a nutshell there are a few things you can do to make your websites accesable to disabled people, firstly you need to consider what impairments people using the web may have and how you can make there lives easier.
The first group of people that spring to mind are visualy impaired people, blind and partialy blind people. blind people navigate the web using peices of hardware or software called screen readers. these devices basicly read a page from left to right. problems occur when a page layout is difficult to read when reading only left to right. for example columbs are very difficult for a screen reader to deal with. if a screen reader is reading a 3 columb page it will read the first line of all 3 collumbs and then the second line etc etc etc. as you can imagine. the page wont make a great deal of sence ! the answer ? CSS positioning ! lay out your page in a logical fashion and use CSS positioning to put your DIV’s in the appropriate place on the screen. screen readers ignore stylesheets so your users get the best posible scenario. those that can get your nice spiffy design and those that cant get a webpage they can read.
You also need to consider deaf people - if you site has multimedia content as many do these days, for example video - you need to provide subscript for the sound so that people who cant hear the sound can read the subscript and get an equaly rich user experiance from your site as a hearing person.
lastly there are motability impared people, people who cant use a mouse for one reason or another. may people with motability impairments have the option of controling a computer with a device they can operate using head movments. You can make there loves a lot easier by providing them with accesskeys (shortcuts to elements on a page) for example.
Profesional pride makes me write HTML that validates, to ease the burden of maintenance and clean up my markup language I use CSS positioning.
I make sure that where appropriate my images have ALT tags that are meaning full and relevant and that my fonts are specified in a relative unit (em’s not px) so that a user can resize the text in there browser.
It takes very little extra effort to go the extra mile and make your pages open for all.