"Accessibility" in reference to your legislative representative means that she holds "town meetings" and answers your email messages; in the case of your boss, that "my door is always open"; in the case of a city, that it's fairly easy to get around and find what you're looking for.

Although a major use of the word has to do with providing access to your web site for people with disabilities (it is required by U.S. law that websites operated by government entities or sites furnishing a "good or service" to the public be accessible), there is an even more general point to accessibility.

The same rules of good design to conform with the WAI guidelines also make your site more accessible to your entire audience. As the technology for on-the-move surfers becomes ever more portable (meaning smaller) and varied as to which sensory mode the user prefers, it becomes very important to render any images as text with the various tags designed for this purpose: ALT, TITLE, LONGDESC. In this way when somebody is "reading" your website on a pager, there won't be that annoying and uninformative "Welcome to " that fails to inform that the clever logo you spent hours drawing doesn't let the user know the site is for "Widgetry Processes, Inc." and you've lost another potential sale!

If you are not interested in reaching (and holding) the widest possible audience or you are designing a web site just to gratify your creative whims then at least label your fancy graphs with "gratuitous graphics" so that the poor hapless surfer who encountered your site through a search engine can use the "back" button to get out of there.