Two recent court cases regarding accessibility:
In the first case, the Atlanta mass transit agency failed to provide an accessible website. In the second, Southwest Airlines site was impossible to use by the visually impaired.
I don't think building an accessible website is that much harder than building any good website. Granted, it does require some care and thought, but the benefits are there. Making a site that is accessible to all can often improve usability for everyone. And an accessible website is also more valuable to some unexpected categories of users, such as automated search engine "spiders" that crawl the web. Properly marked-up documents can make it easier for these spiders to figure out what your page is all about.
A nice intro into the subject can be found at Dive Into Accessibility. It is aimed at weblog authors, but most of the advice listed on this site can be generalized to all web development activities. There have also been a number of books recently published. I'm hoping to get my hands on them soon...
Posted by Karl
October 22, 2002 06:40 PM