ptg16476052Workshop 62122
Summary
I hope you now realize that the needs of your visitors should affect the approach you use
in your website design. The key is to anticipate those needs and try to address them as
broadly as possible. Not every site has to be filled with multimedia that implements the
latest and greatest web technologies. On the other hand, certain topics almost demand
higher levels of page design. Listen to the needs of your visitors when you design your
pages, and you’ll keep them coming back.
Even though accessibility issues ostensibly affect only a small percentage of web users,
they should not be ignored. Many accessibility-related improvements actually improve
the web experience for most users. Leaving out disabled users by not accounting for them
in your designs is inconsiderate and can often be a poor business decision. Adding acces-
sibility features to an existing site can be challenging, but when you build new sites from
scratch, making them accessible can often be done with little additional effort. If I’ve
convinced you of the importance of accessibility in this lesson, you’ll probably want to
dig into the resources listed previously for more information.
Workshop
As if you haven’t had enough already, here’s a refresher course. As always, there are
questions, quizzes, and exercises that will help you remember some of the most important
points in this lesson.
Further Reading
This lesson is really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to handling accessibility on
websites. If you’re going to make a commitment to creating an accessible site, you’ll
probably want to research the issue further. Your first stop should be online acces-
sibility resources. The W3C provides a huge body of information on accessibility as
part of their Web Access ibility Initiative. The home page is http://www.w3.org/WAI/.
If you maintain a personal site, you might also find Mark Pilgrim’s online book, Dive
into Accessibility (http://diveintoaccessibility.info/), to be a useful resource.
There have also been several books written on web accessibility. Joe Clark’s
Building Accessible Websites is very well regarded. You can fin d out more about the
book at the book’s website: http://joeclark.org/book/.