The Road to Accessibility
By Lynda Weinman
I've been on the road a lot this past month, presenting at various conferences, and I was profoundly struck by the earnestness of most Web publishers and designers -- intent on designing good sites, yet frustrated by the obstacles raised by multiple browsers, platforms, and systems. One enthusiastic student from Brazil deplored Americans' myopic view of the Web. He contended that we're oblivious to the slow connections in other countries, where every kilobyte of file savings matters, and bemoaned the fact that most sites he visited were unviewable because the graphics take interminably long to download.
His words haunted me, and lead me to conclude that the big picture in Web-site design is often lost. Communication is at the heart of Web publishing, and the key to communication is understanding your audience and designing for them. Creating compelling Web sites requires understanding a new medium with strange rules and unusual constraints.
Amidst these thoughts about communication on the Web, I read my friend Crystal Waters' new book, Universal Web Design: A Comprehensive Guide to Creating Accessible Web Sites (New Riders Publishing, ISBN 1-56205-738-3). This entertaining, thought-provoking, and informative volume focuses on a hitherto overlooked aspect of Web design: accessibility. (For ongoing coverage about accessibility, see Web Techniques' "Web Enabled" department, by Mike Paciello, first published in October 1997.) It proscribes a course of action for retaining a site's cool graphics and features, while incorporating extra amenities that offer wider accessibility.
