A Different Web Accessibility Primer Support
Most introductory web accessibility articles start with a general overview of what accessibility is, why it is important and then point to the same general set of resources at the World Wide Web Consortium for reference. For this article, I wanted to start somewhere different - somewhere that I hope might make a difference to the way you view accessibility and how it impacts your work as a web professional.
Two of the three biggest hurdles that web professionals need to clear (this includes all of us) are more mental than technical. The first is admitting that we don't know as much about how people use the web as we think we do - what we "know" is a pretty narrow slice of the web and how it is used. The second is that we need to accept - and perhaps embrace - the fact that we have a lot less control than we might like. Once we get past those two barriers, we can then move on to the third hurdle: the technical side of making our web sites and applications more accessible.
Derek Featherstone
I left the world of teaching high school in 1999 to start my own business as a freelance technical trainer. I taught and wrote a number of courses on topics varying from basic HTML, to CSS and JavaScript, database design and Active Server Pages as well as Web Accessibility.
Now there really isn't just one thing that I do -- in addition to training and delivering seminars, I run my own web development company (furtherahead.com), spend a lot of time as a web accessibilty consultant (wats.ca), and write at my blog (boxofchocolates.ca). And that's all between spending time with my family, though I'm sure it often seems like I spend time with them in between everything else. I'm a father of three, and husband to one...