<img src="http://www.ubbdev.com/uzine/images/wheelchair.jpg" style="border: 1px black solid" align="left">
Website Accessibility
By: Bill Bernstein





Editor's note: Bill runs
a website/ubb forum for information exchange and support for people dealing
with disabilities: http://www.ppsweb.net . Among other things, he will be assisting us in completing a set of templates that will pass web accessibilty standards. It will be a good bit of work, but afterall, isn't the web for everyone?



Website Accessibility - What's all the fuss?

Okay, we've probably all heard at least some mention of "Accessibility" when designing webpages. What's the big deal? Why should we bother with "all that"?

Well, think about it. Suppose you were color blind. No big deal? It is, if RED buttons are different than GREEN ones. Or try this one, you slammed your hand in a car door. (Klutz!) No serious damage, but your "good" hand and wrist are in major pain. That mouse is a real challenge to use with your "other" hand, huh?

See, designing web pages for "accessibility" is all about making them usable to more people, whether the problem they're dealing with is temporary or permanent.

What? You don't want to change your stuff all around just so some "visually impaired" chick can use it too?

Here's the thing. It's not about changing the way everything looks. It's mostly about building in some flexibility, giving people a choice in how they access the information. And we *do* want everyone that visits our sites to be able to access them, right?

So what do we do? Nobody's got the time or energy to go back and redo every page we've ever done. But we can start to think about how to make them better *when* we make changes anyway, right? Maybe next time you insert a graphic, you can go ahead and plug in an "alt=" tag with a text description. Or lay the page out so the color is still there, but you can make sense of it without the color.

Check it out ===> Here are some links to sites about HOW to make them more accessible, and some tools to help along the way.

World Wide Web Consortium - Web Accessibility Initiative
http://www.w3c.org/
Center for Applied Special Technology - Bobby Pages
http://www.cast.org/bobby