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I don't understand this statement "Tables lock your user into your content via your specific design" in that, how else are they going to view it?

Through a screen reader, maybe? In which case your table layout will completely fail, because screen readers expect the contents of TABLE tags to be, you know, tabular data.

You need to understand that blind and vision-impaired people will be among those "viewing" your page, and design accordingly.

(X)HTML, on the other hand, is quite accessible by default, since you'd have to work really hard to avoid any semantic markup at all.

Semantic markup is a step towards accessibility, but semantic markup does not equal accessibility. Lots of otherwise well-authored (X)HTML sites omit ALT attributes on their IMG tags, for example, either because the author doesn't know that they need to provide them, or doesn't care. Lots of otherwise well-authored (X)HTML sites omit TITLE attributes on their links, either because the author doesn't know that they need to provide them, or doesn't care. And so on.

Accessibility isn't easy and you don't get it for free, no matter which format you use.

(X)HTML, on the other hand, is quite accessible by default, since you'd have to work really hard to avoid any semantic markup at all.

Semantic markup is a step towards accessibility, but semantic markup does not equal accessibility. Lots of otherwise well-authored (X)HTML sites omit ALT attributes on their IMG tags, for example, either because the author doesn't know that they need to provide them, or doesn't care. Lots of otherwise well-authored (X)HTML sites omit TITLE attributes on their links, either because the author doesn't know that they need to provide them, or doesn't care. And so on.

Accessibility isn't easy and you don't get it for free, no matter which format you use.

1) The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) has little or nothing to do with web accessibility. (It may, pending the results of NFB v Target. But not now.) You need to check out the requirements in Section 508 if you'll be working with/for federal agencies. You need to read up on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), including Joe Clark's criticism of them. I suggest starting with WebAIM and Mark Pilgrim's excellent (though dated) Dive Into Accessibility.

2) Hire a good writer and a good photographer, or an agency which has 'em. Content is king. "Punching up" the design doesn't mean a thing without that foundation.

"The TABLE tag is for tabular data only, don't use it for arranging the page". What crap. The table tag is amazingly useful, it works in all browsers, and no I don't mind in the least typing TR and TD everywhere. It's simple and it works.

Unless your reader is blind or visually impaired, and using a screen reader, in which case your page will blow up spectacularly. Or if they try to access your page via a mobile phone browser. Etc., etc.

Attention all web developers: please read this and think about how broad the range of web users truly is.

(Oh, and if you don't give a flying fark about blind people or phones -- moving your style instructions from the HTML into CSS files will cut down on the total volume of info your users have to download by an order of magnitude, reducing your bandwidth costs.)

Another thing I didn't like about this article was its use of the phrase "disabled people". It's about THE BLIND, so just say THE BLIND.

Tell that to somebody with perfect eyesight and impaired motor skills. There are a lot of dimensions to accessibility.

The standard access keys, according to Dive Into Accessibility are:
Access key 1 Home page Access key 2 Skip to main content (the navigation bar skip link) Access key 9 Feedback Access key 0 Accessibility statement
so I think you are on to something there. Stick to numbers and you stand a good chance of not conflicting with any browser short cuts.

Not to mention it's 10px Verdana. If you don't have Verdana installed on your system and another font is substituted, it looks about 2px smaller due to Verdana's larger than normal aspect ratio. Given that Mozilla's default is something like 15-16px and many people have to increase the size above the default, I think this isn't the best person to be preaching about accessibility.

Folks, if you have a website, even if it's just a weblog, the most effective thing you can do to increase accessibility is to read Dive Into Accessibility and apply the things you learn to your website.

Forgot to mention: http://diveintoaccessibility.org/

'target' was part of the standard HTML 4.0. It has been deprecated in XHTML 1.1. The reason for it is not to force you to use Javascript, it is an accessibility issue. The idea is to discourage the creation of new windows unless the user explicitly requests so (by right-clicking on the link rather than left-clicking for instance). The reason for this is to make sites more accessible to people with disabilities. Forcing the browser to open a new window tends to confuse people because they might not always be aware that this has happened, especially if they have some sort of disability. For more information on the problem, see http://diveintoaccessibility.org/

HTML is accessible almost by nature, but there are certainly things that the developer has to be cognizant of there as well to truly fit that goal.

I'd say more than a few things. I haven't looked into making flash accessible, but making a truly accessible html site requires a fair amount of planning and effort.

Here is an example of a site, and how it looks in an older browser, where the developers claim they are using "web standards" to make a site, and it degrades horribly.

That site uses tables to layout non-tabular content, which is a big css no-no. It also does not validate. Validating is part one of being standards compliant. Following the basic rules of how to appropriately use css is part two. Complying with all the tips from dive into accessibility is part three.

Correctly designed, by someone who knows what they're doing, a css-based site will always degrade gracefully. Always.

Validate your css too. If you're not using css, hello to you from the 21st century.

And also, improve accessibility. The validator only checks whether your html complies with the standards, but doesn't guarantee usability. Implementing these relatively simple (albeit numerous) accessibility guidelines ensures your site will work correctly in just about every browsing tool on the platform, whether it be lynx, jaws (browser for the blind), or the entire safari.

Try browsing the web with links. No mouse, no scrollbars. If you can't access a website with links, it's badly designed for blind people.

Btw, links uses arrow left for back, arrow down to move between links, and arrow right to follow a link.

Nowadays it's relatively easy to build a website that has excellent support for screen readers. Just do a div based layout (instead of tables), with the navigation at the end of the html, instead of at the beginning (like you have to do with table-based layouts). Don't use tables except for data that is already tabular by nature (calendars, statistics, ...). CSS is powerful enough and widely supported enough to use for every website, so you don't need tables for layout. (That's not to say CSS can do all table-based layouts, but tables can't do all CSS-based layouts, so it evens out.)

Ofcourse, there are tons of features to improve usability for blind readers. Accesskeys, alt tags, ... There are a lot of good tips to improve accessibility here.

As an aside, I've never, ever, seen a good reason to use javascript. Verifying user input breaks when webbrowsers don't support javascript, and you can do it just as easily on the server. Javascript menu's are preferably replaced with css menu's. And javascript launched advertising is the devil's work.

Hehe, Slashdot's not really a shining example of web accessibility, but it's a good place to ask for help none-the-less.

The first stops for help (as someone's no doubt pointed out already) should be:

Section 508

Mark Pilgrim's excellent "Dive Into Accessibility"

The W3C's web accessibility guide

The UK Disabled Rights Commission website, paying particular attention to the superb Interactive Demos (e.g. Inaccessible Website Demo).

Buy these books:

Constructing Accessible Websites

Building Accessible Websites

Oh, and a copy of Zeldman's Designing With Web Standards for good measure.

Write your pages using validating HTML or XHTML, and style the pages using CSS.

Validate your webpages using the W3C Validator and your CSS using the W3C CSS Validator. Use Watchfire's Bobby to validate your pages, and aim for AAA rating (also note that Bobby has some helpful hints when it does find errors).

Other excellent resources (in no particular order):

http://www.webstandards.org/
http://www.w3.org/WAI/References/QuickTips/
http://www.mezzoblue.com/
http://www.meyerweb.com/
http://www.simplebits.com/
http://www.whatdoiknow.org/
http://www.stopdesign.com/

Try web design circles. These issues come up from time to time. For instance, Dive Into Accessibility has a lot of good stuff not limited to web design.

Try seeing things from their angle. This world is built for people who can see perfectly, hear perfectly, walk perfectly, and talk perfectly. This goes double for the technological world. There are more "imperfect" people out there than you think. Small little things which aren't the same in you are me which we take for granted which cause a great amount of difficulty for someone else because no one even thought to ask them about their condition or what they could do to make things easier for them.

To give you an example, this technical feature also discriminates against the color blind as well, and 10% of Americans are color blind in some fashion. 10% of americans. Not so insignificant any more huh?

Some great information on accessibility is located here, and you can probably find plenty of papers on accessibility on google, but if you need to go looking for them, you obviously aren't disabled enough to be able to look for them yourself.

You're missing half the beauty if you don't grab the Toggle CSS Stylesheet bookmarklet/favlet and use it when you check out the winning entry.

Because of all the proper structure in the HTML (like proper usage of Hx, and Acronym tags), it still looks good and is easily readable without the CSS. It even unhides "skip to" links (see Dive Into Accessibility) for easier navigation at the top for non-visual browsers.

My only quibble is the repetitive usage of spans with a class called "none" to hide the navigation dividing pipes ("|") when CSS is enabled. Maybe a structure using unordered lists might read better semantically.

The problem is, it's not a matter of just allowing "text-only" browsers to correctly display your page; your pages should "make sense" from a semantical point of view, thus allowing semantic interpreters (such as browsers for blind persons and so on) to easily and correctly parse them. e.g. put the "title" attribute in your anchors, consider accesskeys, validate your xhtml, etc etc.

For further things, take a look at Dive Into Accessibility, a really good book.

This brings up a question which I'd like to see discussed either here, or in a new topic. I do not have a disability that prevents me from accessing the web via traditional means. However, I'm curious to ask people who use assistive devices: what is your experience going online like? How much content can you access? How do you feel about it? I know these questions have been generally answered by the document, but I'm curious about personal stories.

Well they're probably not going to answer 'cause slashdot isn't exactly the most accessible site! Try reading /. in Lynx for example, and you'll see how difficult it as. Now imagine a screen reader reading all of that, without the option of skipping it, it's going to get cumbersome very quickly.

I think a good start to understanding accessibility would be Mark Pilgrim's site - more specifically his Dive Into Accessibility site. While this concentrates more on weblogs (hence the "30 days to a more accessible weblog" slogan), it's still very useful.

Mark focusses on accessibility by using fictional (but perfectly plausable) character sketches of five people: Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus.

Quoting the site:
These people have several things in common:

1. They all have a combination of physical, mental, and technological disabilities which make it more difficult to use the Internet.
2. Although fictitious, they all represent real people with disabilities, and they use the Internet in ways that real people with disabilities use the Internet.
3. They all have difficulty reading your web site.

If you design pages for a living, or even if you've just got a personal blog I'd highly recommend that you read Dive Into Accessibility, you'll be a more accessible person because of it.

Cheers,

This brings up a question which I'd like to see discussed either here, or in a new topic. I do not have a disability that prevents me from accessing the web via traditional means. However, I'm curious to ask people who use assistive devices: what is your experience going online like? How much content can you access? How do you feel about it? I know these questions have been generally answered by the document, but I'm curious about personal stories.

Well they're probably not going to answer 'cause slashdot isn't exactly the most accessible site! Try reading /. in Lynx for example, and you'll see how difficult it as. Now imagine a screen reader reading all of that, without the option of skipping it, it's going to get cumbersome very quickly.

I think a good start to understanding accessibility would be Mark Pilgrim's site - more specifically his Dive Into Accessibility site. While this concentrates more on weblogs (hence the "30 days to a more accessible weblog" slogan), it's still very useful.

Mark focusses on accessibility by using fictional (but perfectly plausable) character sketches of five people: Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus.

Quoting the site:
These people have several things in common:

1. They all have a combination of physical, mental, and technological disabilities which make it more difficult to use the Internet.
2. Although fictitious, they all represent real people with disabilities, and they use the Internet in ways that real people with disabilities use the Internet.
3. They all have difficulty reading your web site.

If you design pages for a living, or even if you've just got a personal blog I'd highly recommend that you read Dive Into Accessibility, you'll be a more accessible person because of it.

Cheers,

This brings up a question which I'd like to see discussed either here, or in a new topic. I do not have a disability that prevents me from accessing the web via traditional means. However, I'm curious to ask people who use assistive devices: what is your experience going online like? How much content can you access? How do you feel about it? I know these questions have been generally answered by the document, but I'm curious about personal stories.

Well they're probably not going to answer 'cause slashdot isn't exactly the most accessible site! Try reading /. in Lynx for example, and you'll see how difficult it as. Now imagine a screen reader reading all of that, without the option of skipping it, it's going to get cumbersome very quickly.

I think a good start to understanding accessibility would be Mark Pilgrim's site - more specifically his Dive Into Accessibility site. While this concentrates more on weblogs (hence the "30 days to a more accessible weblog" slogan), it's still very useful.

Mark focusses on accessibility by using fictional (but perfectly plausable) character sketches of five people: Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus.

Quoting the site:
These people have several things in common:

1. They all have a combination of physical, mental, and technological disabilities which make it more difficult to use the Internet.
2. Although fictitious, they all represent real people with disabilities, and they use the Internet in ways that real people with disabilities use the Internet.
3. They all have difficulty reading your web site.

If you design pages for a living, or even if you've just got a personal blog I'd highly recommend that you read Dive Into Accessibility, you'll be a more accessible person because of it.

Cheers,

This brings up a question which I'd like to see discussed either here, or in a new topic. I do not have a disability that prevents me from accessing the web via traditional means. However, I'm curious to ask people who use assistive devices: what is your experience going online like? How much content can you access? How do you feel about it? I know these questions have been generally answered by the document, but I'm curious about personal stories.

Well they're probably not going to answer 'cause slashdot isn't exactly the most accessible site! Try reading /. in Lynx for example, and you'll see how difficult it as. Now imagine a screen reader reading all of that, without the option of skipping it, it's going to get cumbersome very quickly.

I think a good start to understanding accessibility would be Mark Pilgrim's site - more specifically his Dive Into Accessibility site. While this concentrates more on weblogs (hence the "30 days to a more accessible weblog" slogan), it's still very useful.

Mark focusses on accessibility by using fictional (but perfectly plausable) character sketches of five people: Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus.

Quoting the site:
These people have several things in common:

1. They all have a combination of physical, mental, and technological disabilities which make it more difficult to use the Internet.
2. Although fictitious, they all represent real people with disabilities, and they use the Internet in ways that real people with disabilities use the Internet.
3. They all have difficulty reading your web site.

If you design pages for a living, or even if you've just got a personal blog I'd highly recommend that you read Dive Into Accessibility, you'll be a more accessible person because of it.

Cheers,

This brings up a question which I'd like to see discussed either here, or in a new topic. I do not have a disability that prevents me from accessing the web via traditional means. However, I'm curious to ask people who use assistive devices: what is your experience going online like? How much content can you access? How do you feel about it? I know these questions have been generally answered by the document, but I'm curious about personal stories.

Well they're probably not going to answer 'cause slashdot isn't exactly the most accessible site! Try reading /. in Lynx for example, and you'll see how difficult it as. Now imagine a screen reader reading all of that, without the option of skipping it, it's going to get cumbersome very quickly.

I think a good start to understanding accessibility would be Mark Pilgrim's site - more specifically his Dive Into Accessibility site. While this concentrates more on weblogs (hence the "30 days to a more accessible weblog" slogan), it's still very useful.

Mark focusses on accessibility by using fictional (but perfectly plausable) character sketches of five people: Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus.

Quoting the site:
These people have several things in common:

1. They all have a combination of physical, mental, and technological disabilities which make it more difficult to use the Internet.
2. Although fictitious, they all represent real people with disabilities, and they use the Internet in ways that real people with disabilities use the Internet.
3. They all have difficulty reading your web site.

If you design pages for a living, or even if you've just got a personal blog I'd highly recommend that you read Dive Into Accessibility, you'll be a more accessible person because of it.

Cheers,

This brings up a question which I'd like to see discussed either here, or in a new topic. I do not have a disability that prevents me from accessing the web via traditional means. However, I'm curious to ask people who use assistive devices: what is your experience going online like? How much content can you access? How do you feel about it? I know these questions have been generally answered by the document, but I'm curious about personal stories.

Well they're probably not going to answer 'cause slashdot isn't exactly the most accessible site! Try reading /. in Lynx for example, and you'll see how difficult it as. Now imagine a screen reader reading all of that, without the option of skipping it, it's going to get cumbersome very quickly.

I think a good start to understanding accessibility would be Mark Pilgrim's site - more specifically his Dive Into Accessibility site. While this concentrates more on weblogs (hence the "30 days to a more accessible weblog" slogan), it's still very useful.

Mark focusses on accessibility by using fictional (but perfectly plausable) character sketches of five people: Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus.

Quoting the site:
These people have several things in common:

1. They all have a combination of physical, mental, and technological disabilities which make it more difficult to use the Internet.
2. Although fictitious, they all represent real people with disabilities, and they use the Internet in ways that real people with disabilities use the Internet.
3. They all have difficulty reading your web site.

If you design pages for a living, or even if you've just got a personal blog I'd highly recommend that you read Dive Into Accessibility, you'll be a more accessible person because of it.

Cheers,

This brings up a question which I'd like to see discussed either here, or in a new topic. I do not have a disability that prevents me from accessing the web via traditional means. However, I'm curious to ask people who use assistive devices: what is your experience going online like? How much content can you access? How do you feel about it? I know these questions have been generally answered by the document, but I'm curious about personal stories.

Well they're probably not going to answer 'cause slashdot isn't exactly the most accessible site! Try reading /. in Lynx for example, and you'll see how difficult it as. Now imagine a screen reader reading all of that, without the option of skipping it, it's going to get cumbersome very quickly.

I think a good start to understanding accessibility would be Mark Pilgrim's site - more specifically his Dive Into Accessibility site. While this concentrates more on weblogs (hence the "30 days to a more accessible weblog" slogan), it's still very useful.

Mark focusses on accessibility by using fictional (but perfectly plausable) character sketches of five people: Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus.

Quoting the site:
These people have several things in common:

1. They all have a combination of physical, mental, and technological disabilities which make it more difficult to use the Internet.
2. Although fictitious, they all represent real people with disabilities, and they use the Internet in ways that real people with disabilities use the Internet.
3. They all have difficulty reading your web site.

If you design pages for a living, or even if you've just got a personal blog I'd highly recommend that you read Dive Into Accessibility, you'll be a more accessible person because of it.

Cheers,

But it's fully covered in Joe's answer to the question posted by "acehole".

Convert all web pages to accessible formats, convert all books (ever) to audio books, redesign pedestrian access for the sightless...

or put money into researching artificial eyes.

Joe put it very well. You obviously missed it:

I also reject, in the strongest possible terms, the offensive and offhand claim that accessibility can be achieved "at great expense." I believe the colloquial term for a claim like this is bullshit. "Updating" or retrofitting a site for accessibility does cost more than designing it properly in the first place, but that's true everywhere: Have you costed out adding barrier-free access to an old building vs. including it in the original designs? Retrofitting may cost more, but I deny that the expense is "great." Even very extensive sites with huge swaths of multimedia can be made accessible, and it is doubtful that, given the budgets of such sites, the expense would be "great."

I honestly wonder which would be cheaper?

I honestly wonder if you read the answer to the second question, where Joe says that HTML-based sites can take care of much of the accessibility problem by simply using valid HTML with good ALT tags, and including a "skip nav links" link near the top of the page.

Even if you went crazy and did all this stuff, it's all pretty simple and easy things to do. Much of it is just good practice in HTML. Most of the "captioning" (that ordinary IE users never see) is helpful for indexing in google and other search engines, which is pretty good reason to do it anyway.

The key point is that it's not expensive. Almost every single image on every good website involves quite a bit of work, at least croping and scaling. Many times a thumbnail is created and a link made to the larger image, or a dedicated page with the larger image. Fancy drop shadowing and other effects are commonly added, as are rounded corners. Considerable work goes of course goes into creating the image in the first place, wether that's composing it or taking a photo (posing the subject, lighting, transfering from the digital camera or negative, etc).

The effort (and expense) of an ALT tag is so very minor compared to the effort/expense that went into the original preparation of the image and its placement within the site.

Likewise, adding a "skip nav" link into the nav bar is a rather trivial task compared to the design of the nav bar itself. Many sites are built from a template (like mine). All you need to do is add it into the template. Yes, that does take some small amount of work, which is more than doing nothing, but compared to all the work that went into the nav bar, it's really very minor. Sites that don't update from a template STILL go to all the trouble of having navigation links. They're doing it _somehow_, and adding just more more tiny link, that's the same on every page and never even "breaks" because it always points within the same page is really just a very tiny increase.

It's really not hard. I did it to my site today after reading Joe's responses. I probably spent about 20 minutes on it, mostly updating some test pages before updating the live site. Now, I'll admit that I haven't updated the home page and some special pages yet... but the vast majority of pages that are built from the template were very easily updated. Also, I should admit that I checked a several sites and nearly all are using the approach of a small invisible GIF with "skip navigational links" as the ALT text (contrary to Joe's suggestion)... so I went with the established practice used on lots of other major sites that are targeted at people with disabilities.

Nearly all my images (about 630 unique files on pjrc.com) have ALT text already, as that's just a normal part of good HTML practice.

It's really very cheap and easy. I can afford it. I spent no money, 20 minutes on the "skip nav" link, and I just type an ALT tag for every image (which is less work than even the simplest image processing). It costs a LOT less than research to develop artificial organs!

Dive In To Accessibility

WAI

Colour blind checker

ISU

Your example is a bit disturbing ... in that they don't declare a DOCTYPE at all!

That said, when I want ahead and chose 4.01 Transitional for them, it got back almot 4 dozen HTML errors. Similar results for other DocTypes as well. OOOFTA!

Mark Pilgrim, the guy behind Dive Into Accessibility offers some comments on this article, Southwest off the hook in his weblog Dive Into Mark.

... you can also look at Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Accessibility, which I've found quite helpful.

Some times Mark's server is inaccessible, in that case, here is a mirror of the document at Vincent Flander's Fixing Your Web Site : Dive Into Accessibility.

There is also a pretty interesting example of usability gone wild at Chris Davis' - Sillyness spelled wrong intentionally who's site validates as XHTML 1.0 strict :: CSS 2 :: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and U.S. Section 508 Guidelines.

I've often wondered if sometimes we're not all hooked into usability for usability sake, sometime forsaking compelling content? Not so much in the case of Chris Davis, but of some other sites claiming to be diciples of 'the Pilgrim'.

Mark Pilgrim has a wonderful site at http://diveintoaccessibility.org/

It's set up as a 30-day transformation process, with each day containing a new change. He includes has a few example characters, each with their own unique set of disabilities and/or web-browsing choices, and he explains how each of these people would benefit from said changes.