Personal web pages - home sites

I am currently building my first web site, which I want to be as 
accessible as I can make it. I have of course found a vast amount of 
 useful information at the W3C web site. The focus of my comments 
concerns the fact that for an individual like myself who wishes to 
tackle accessibility, there is really far too much detail, but not 
enough guidance through examples.

A lot of  the web must be taken up with people's own efforts at site 
building and some are to a very high standard. Now I visit a lot of 
hobby/pastime related sites created and maintained by the hobbyist's 
themselves, but I have only ever once seen a page with a W3C button on 
it. Guess what, when I clicked on the button the page failed the validation.

These days everyone seems to be caught up with the flashy, graphical, 
slow loading pages. Particually with the commercial sites. While in my 
case I figured that it was more than likely that someone with the same 
interests as myself may wish to visit my site but would need it to be 
accessible in order to use it.

I soon realised that products such as FrontPage produce really bad code 
without you realizing, because it's so easy to create content with it. 
Only when you start to look under the HTML tab do you start to 
comprehend the problem.

I have spent hours on line reading documents at the W3C site, but feel 
that this sort of presentation is best for business or web professionals 
rather than the individual. My suggestion would be for a section aimed 
at the home user and including example HTML to clarify what is needed. 
Maybe it's not possible for you to offer this but my logic says that if 
you can help more of the smaller sites to become more accessible, then 
the larger ones will want to follow.

I wonder how many people have investigated your pages only to drop the 
idea as they see it as too much extra work or maybe they don't have the 
skill to work out the correct HTML for themselves. I personally felt 
rather daunted at first but was determined to see it through because I 
want my site to be accessible. My situation would certainly have been 
easied if I could have found some real life working examples to study. 
Perhaps it might be possible for someone to study the possibility of 
this idea becoming a reality.

In closing I would like to say that I did get a feeling of great 
satisfaction when I put some of my finished pages through the on line 
version of Bobby and they passed to the triple-A level.

Kind regards,

Paul Smith

Received on Wednesday, 10 April 2002 20:58:41 UTC