How to the rest of you a/b people (i.e. able bodied) cater to users with various forms of disability?
Up until recently, I've tended to rely on keeping my code to standards, eliminating tables except for their proper purpose of tabulating data, and hoping that will give the accessibility level required. Do you go to the step of accessing your sites with JAWS or something similar to see how the site works for users with screen readers? I remember in the 1990s when I was working at Australian Consumers Association (choice.com.au) we had someone come and bring his PC with JAWS. The web team all sat in the boardroom getting ever more glum looks on our faces as we saw to our horror how terrible our new design was for this poor guy. We thought we'd got a terrific new design, and were about to launch it, when he did this demo for us. We had to go back and recode everything. This was before anyone was talking about standards though - it was back when the normally accepted method of laying out pages was to use tables, and buttons were nearly always images. I remember being astounded at how fast he was moving around the page, even though we'd unwittingly designed an obstacle course of humungous proportions for him. Our anguish at the time resulted in a far better web site, and convinced me to pay attention to standards and accessibility ever since. But now I'm wondering if simply sticking to standards is enough? What do you all think? Do you include JAWS in your site testing? Cheers Mike Kear Windsor, NSW, Australia Adobe Certified Advanced ColdFusion Developer AFP Webworks http://afpwebworks.com ColdFusion 9 Enterprise, PHP, ASP, ASP.NET hosting from AUD$15/month ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *******************************************************************
