Different jobs call for different rules…. If you’ve never come across the W3C Accessibility Guidelines I would suggest a read… Time for an educational lesson today!
In brief…
- Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content
- Don’t rely on color alone
- Use markup and style sheets and do so properly
- Clarify the usage of natural language
- Create tables that transform gracefully
- Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully
- Ensure user control of time-sensitive content changes
- Ensure direct accessibility of embedded user interfaces
- Design for device-independence
- Use interim solutions
- Use W3C technologies and guidelines
- Provide context and orientation information
- Provide clear navigation mechanisms
- Ensure that documents are clear and simple
The above points, explained in detail are available here from Sitepoint. You might also want to take a look at the W3C’s own site, or even Microsoft’s Accessibility Website
Accessibility is very important in web design. And not just because the law protects the right of people with disabilities to access information. Think of all the different devices (PDAs, mobiles), different operating systems, screen resolutions, web browsers etc that people may use to get to a website! Would it be accessible enough to all?
Bluntly, no, it wouldn’t. Not in most cases. But keeping things xhtml and css valid, helps to make everything accessible to a lot more people and devices.
Sure does… its just thats start to get yourself in the habit of making everything xhtml compliant and validated, shake off the old habits!