Web Accessibility Examples

To all:

I'm working on an article on web accessibility for a national e-business
publication and I need this group's help.  

I'm relatively new in the field of accessibility although I have been
working with websites for a few years now. (And I'm a technical writer by
trade.)  I would like to help promote the importance of including
accessibility in any design criteria -- whether it be a storefront or a
company information site -- to the managers who set a direction for their
web design team.  In some cases, the audience may actually be the designers
themselves, so I want to stress both the importance of why they need to do
it (legal, moral, business benefit) and how they can do it (with certain
types of codes, inclusion of certain codes, using certain aspects of CSS,
etc.).

In pouring through some of the information sites and by listening to  this
newsgroup, I have a decent feel for some of the considerations and things
one should do, but I'm still having a bit of trouble with pulling it all
together in a solid set of recommendations given a site using some of the
modern visual techniques commonly used. 

So if I can, I would like to propose a scenario and would appreciate your
help in "fixing" the site.

XYZ Widgits is a manufacturer and has a site with:

Flash (or Shockwave) animation on the front page
Java roll-over, fly-out menu to help select where you want to go
Table-based pages
Various graphics that need alt text tags.
Designer had no knowledge or consideration for accessibility, so didn't go
out of his way to include anything.

Please be kind to me (some of the emails in this group get rather "testy.")
My intent is to help the cause and if I can get some of your points across
on a national level, I'd be happy to.

By the way, I encourage all of you to take the cause to the national
internet and e-business publications.  The more we contact these
publications -- with letters to the editors or articles -- the more business
people will take notice of what they need to do with accessibility.  That is
what I am trying to do and there is plenty of room for others.  

Thanks for your help!

Guy

Guy Ball
Senior Technical Writer
Unisys Corp.

Received on Thursday, 5 October 2000 12:20:06 UTC