Customer Reviews

Design Accessible Web Sites: 36 Keys to Creating Content for All Audiences and Platforms (Pragmatic Programmers)

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There is a lot more to accessibility than just taking the needs of a small percentage of your visitors with obvious disabilities into account as this book clearly demonstrates. The book starts by considering the various types of disability - visual, audial, and cognative - and throughout the book covers a huge range of things that can be taken into account in order to make a web site easier for people with varying degrees of disability in any of these areas to use.

The order in which the information is presented in this book makes the book easy to use regardless of the type of web site that you are creating. The aspects of accessibility that apply to all web sites are dealt with in the earlier part of the book where such things as colour selection to allow people who are colour-blind to still read the page and how to make the page usable forr people without a mouse are covered. When to use tables and how to make them accessible when you do use them is also covered in the early part of the book. The middle part of the book covers accessibility for a variety of technologies that only some web sites use providing the information that you need if you are using those technologies. The section at the back covers the current and proposed accessibility guidelines and steps you through what those guidelines actually mean. Some of the guidelines relate to proposed technologies that never actually eventuated or specify how things needed to be done to make pages accesssible in really old browsers that no one uses any more and the book makes it clear how the guidelines actually specified when certain methods would be no longer applicable.

This is an excellent book on how to make any web site more accessible. I do suggest however that reading the book through from start to finish is not the best way of benefitting from this book as reading the book that way it tends to become repetitive and boring. Instead you should start by reading part one and then read the other parts of the book as you find a need.

As the world continues to march to information on the Internet, the issue of accessibility for Web sites has continued to grow in importance. Especially as glitz and flashy programming grow ever more popular in Web design, the chance of leaving those with special needs behind increases. What accessibility means also can be a murky area, though as lawsuits against Target and other stores over Web accessibility shows, this is still important. Sydik helps cut through the often vague standards to show the reader step-by-step things that are important for accessibility, but often are not major changes. He explains what accessibility entails, and looks at different solutions, and the pitfalls that some can produce making things worse for accessibility when it is trying to improve it. His chapters are grouped into thematic sections, but each chapter focuses on one item, keeping the information short and relevant to the topic. At the conclusion he walks through the current and proposed accessibility standards and gives practical advice and translation of what the sections mean, and what you can do about it (citing chapters that addressed the topic). This book is very readable, practical and sits on my desk for quick reference and advice. It is an excellent starting point for acquainting yourself with the issue of accessibility for Web sites and what you can do to help design them properly.

Jeremy's Design Accessible Web Sites provides practical advice alongside with the theoretical underpinnigs in upbeat style. This books covers actionable steps to take in fixing many common accessibility problems but it also does something more important. It gives the reader a theoretical framework for considering and solving accessibility issues for tricky scenarios.

Some other books are better on regulatory issues and others on multimedia items like Flash since the focus here is web site design. That said, it's a great read for web site design and web standards work. For that it's first rate, with modern techniques and consideration of the future of accessibility issues (AJAX, WCAG 2), and with a breadth and richness of subject matter.

DESIGN ACCESSIBLE WEB SITES is an excellent guide to making your web site(s) usable by anyone, regardless of their access needs. It is also not the dry and unfriendly tome that others have put out in regards to this subject...that is to say, it is very readable, even fun in some places! There are plenty of code examples as well as lists of specific tools and references that can be used to make your site accessible to everyone.
It concentrates mainly on the U.S. accessibility requirements, but it also covers what you need around the world.
Most importantly, Jeremy stresses that making your web sites accessible makes them easier for EVERYONE to navigate, not just those individuals with special access needs, and that is a bonus for everyone!