Building an accessible web site means being a professional web developer and doing it right from the beginning. Whining about the burdens of adding alt attributes is simply an excuse to live with your sloppy coding habits.
Target was sued because they were warned that their site was bad and given suggestions to fix them 6 months before the suit was filed. All they needed to do was put alternate text on their images and in their image maps. Instead, they continued to have a site where you had no idea what the navigation was. All of the information was locked inside images.
ADA says that if you are providing a service, that service should be available to everyone regardless of (dis)ability. If you have an online coupon or internet-only sales, you have to give everyone access to those deals.
Is that so tough? If it is, you should get out of the web development world. The future is standards-based web development with CSS, semantic markup, javascript that features graceful degredation. Flash can be accessible! PDF files can be accessible. It may require a bit more work, but that's what professionals do. They don't sit on their butts complaining about the burdens of advancing technology.
You can have a large, complex, and completely accessible web site. Look at Yahoo's new home page, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Tech, and the new Yahoo! Food. These are recent releases that are quite accessible. Google released an accessible web search that gives extra credit to sites that use valid code. Even Microsoft has made some very accessible sites.
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Building an accessible web site means being a professional web developer and doing it right from the beginning. Whining about the burdens of adding alt attributes is simply an excuse to live with your sloppy coding habits.
Target was sued because they were warned that their site was bad and given suggestions to fix them 6 months before the suit was filed. All they needed to do was put alternate text on their images and in their image maps. Instead, they continued to have a site where you had no idea what the navigation was. All of the information was locked inside images.
ADA says that if you are providing a service, that service should be available to everyone regardless of (dis)ability. If you have an online coupon or internet-only sales, you have to give everyone access to those deals.
Is that so tough? If it is, you should get out of the web development world. The future is standards-based web development with CSS, semantic markup, javascript that features graceful degredation. Flash can be accessible! PDF files can be accessible. It may require a bit more work, but that's what professionals do. They don't sit on their butts complaining about the burdens of advancing technology.
You can have a large, complex, and completely accessible web site. Look at Yahoo's new home page, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Tech, and the new Yahoo! Food. These are recent releases that are quite accessible. Google released an accessible web search that gives extra credit to sites that use valid code. Even Microsoft has made some very accessible sites.