Accessible Web sites can be beautiful Web sites
February 24th, 2009
I’ve been tooling around the Internet for the last few days and I’ve noticed that one thing hasn’t changed much in the last ten years: Web sites are almost always accessible, or well-designed, but hardly ever both.
I’m not sure why. At Pemaquid, while we’re not perfect, we always build a high degree of accessibility – at least Level AA – into every site we develop. (Go ahead, check out the sites listed in our Portfolio and run them through your favorite accessibility checker – as long as you don’t bother w/some of the ancient table-based sites towards the bottom of the list.)
Accessibility is only going to become more important as time goes by. You may recall that Target recently settled a lawsuit brought against it by a blind man whose screen reader couldn’t weed his way through the hideous code soup Target’s development team put in front of him.
Companies and governmental organizations are only going to find it more and more important to build accessibility into their sites. Web designers should be up to the task.
Fortunately, when you add accessibility to your Web site, it doesn’t have to ruin a good design concept. It doesn’t have to add cost or overhead to your project either. You just have to take the time to learn about the core issues and build it into your design process.
More Web designers should understand the issues around accessibility and become accustomed to being a problem solver regarding them. The ingredients: an understanding of Web standards and the Web Accessibility Guildelines. A solid understanding of CSS can go a long way towards helping designers deal with accessibility challenges to their design concepts.
One person who uses the latest CSS techniques to create sites with amazing visual designs along with a high degree of accessibility is Andy Clarke (@malarkey on Twitter).
I hope to get back to my roots a bit and start writing and speaking more about accessible design and how the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. I’d love to know what issues you’ve faced regarding accessible design.
