Accessibility F.A.Q.

Bruce explains the reasons why Web Accessibility is important to all Dreamweaver professionals. It's a skill that will become increasingly demanded by clients as more and more legal test cases go to court, and is a great way of making you stand out from the crowd when tendering for jobs. Also, in the same way that architects can be sued as well as building owners if a building doesn't cater for people with disabilities, constructing accessible web sites could just save yourself a lawsuit...

Accessibility Resources

Accessibility is such a hot topic that there's a lot of great resources on and off-line. Here's just a small selection.

Using CSS, valid markup and Web Standards goes a long way towards making your site Accessible. Rachel Andrew and Molly Holzschlag have a series of tutorials here at DMXzone.

www.accessify.com is run by Ian Lloyd, a member of the Web Standards Project, and is a very useful portal and source of information, as are the new forums at www.accessifyforums.com.

The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative 

The UK RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) has a campaign run by the splendid Julie Howell, and some helpful pages

Bob Regan, Senior P.M. of Accessibility at Macromedia has a blog www.macromedia.com/go/bobregan

The glasshaus book "Constructing Accessible Web Sites" has been re-issued by Apress. Many consider this to be the definitive work (but I helped commission it, so am not impartial).

Some reasonably useful links from ICDRI (International Center for Disability resources on the Internet). ICDRI also develop the Cynthia Says validator

Joe Clark wrote a book which is serialized on-line http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/ The author spends too much time making political points and complaining about the guidelines rather than explaining them, but it's free.