If you are in the position of starting work on a new web site, and you wish to ensure that the site is accessible to all users and devices then you should consider accessibility right from the planning stage. If considering accessibility is just another part of your working processes - like ensuring the site looks good on all screen resolutions and optimizing graphics for fast download speeds - then you will soon find that it adds very little time onto development time for a web site and these techniques will become second nature to you anyway.
In this article, Rachel shows how to combine a logical ("semantic") document structure, in combination with cutting-edge CSS styling and design, goes a long way to making an accessible web site that's integrated into your workflow and processes.
This article uses DMX 2004, but is completely backwards compatible with MX, and is suitable for complete beginners.
Rachel Andrew is a trained dancer and singer, whose CV lists jobs as diverse as company choreographer for a physical theatre company to chargehand carpenter for “The Mousetrap” at St. Martin’s Theatre in London’s West End. After leaving the theatre when pregnant with her daughter, Rachel started to design sites mainly out of curiosity into how it worked. It didn’t take too long for her to figure out that her skills lay in development as opposed to design and these days she tends to leave the design to designers so she can concentrate on writing code, dismantling computers and installing Linux on anything that stays still long enough.
Rachel has worked in the industry as a webmaster, technical project manager and senior web developer but in September 2001 set up her own company ‘edgeofmyseat.com’, which provides complete web solutions and outsourced development services for design agencies and Internet start-ups who do not have in-house web developers.
As well as managing and doing much of the development on projects for edgofmyseat.com Rachel is a published author and worked as a co-author on the following titles for Glasshaus:
Dynamic Dreamweaver MX ISBN:1904151108
Fundmental Web Design and development Skills: ISBN:1904151175
Dreamweaver MX Design Projects: ISBN:1904151272
Rachel is also a member of the Web Standards Project serving on The Dreamweaver Task Force.
In her spare time Rachel studies for ‘fun’ with the Open University, does family and local history research and spends time with her 5 year old daughter and her other half, Drew McLellan.