Agreed.
It doesn't take much to make a site accessible to blind people.
There's only a couple things to do to nail it down. Make navigating and reading your site simple. Use HTML tags semantically.
Javascript should be used to enhance the experience (for the sighted), but not as a requirement to interact with the site. This one is a little tougher, but a quick search on "progressive enhancement" should yield some help in this area. It's important to keep in mind that not everyone has javascript enabled, particularly screen reader users, but others as well. So you site should still function and look reasonably good to them as well.
These are particularly important to businesses. sure, it's a minority of people that are blind (estimated 3% in the US), but if you don't make your site accessible to them, you're losing their money.
A List Apart actually has a couple of articles up about this very issue:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype
and
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fromswitchestotargets
I, for one applaud Microsoft (I don't get to say *that* very often) for actually innovating here. They've managed to provide a way to make old sites still work (this is actually pretty important...) and move to a more progressive platform for standards support.
Basically, Bogtha's right on here.
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Agreed. It doesn't take much to make a site accessible to blind people. There's only a couple things to do to nail it down. Make navigating and reading your site simple. Use HTML tags semantically. Javascript should be used to enhance the experience (for the sighted), but not as a requirement to interact with the site. This one is a little tougher, but a quick search on "progressive enhancement" should yield some help in this area. It's important to keep in mind that not everyone has javascript enabled, particularly screen reader users, but others as well. So you site should still function and look reasonably good to them as well. These are particularly important to businesses. sure, it's a minority of people that are blind (estimated 3% in the US), but if you don't make your site accessible to them, you're losing their money.
A List Apart actually has a couple of articles up about this very issue: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype and http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fromswitchestotargets I, for one applaud Microsoft (I don't get to say *that* very often) for actually innovating here. They've managed to provide a way to make old sites still work (this is actually pretty important...) and move to a more progressive platform for standards support. Basically, Bogtha's right on here.