Here, in the States, by virtue of the Americans with
Disabilities Act, we have requirements for
accessibility that, unfortunately, are frequently
overlooked.  Though I found Mr. Gray's comments a
little harsh, it's a question of perspective.  Those
with disabilities are rather tired of being excluded
by society from many venues, websites being among
them.  

Here's a little background info on the website/ADA
issue.

http://www.tbchad.com/Usability/ada_guidelines.html

In addition, you may wish to run your websites through
Bobby to see if there are glaring errors in your site
design.

http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp

The only thing I would also caution, as one who runs a
political disability advocacy forum where we have
members who are blind (among other disabilities) is
that, because they are reliant upon the use of a
reader, it's always better to put your response on top
of text to which you are responding so they don't have
to hear the same words over and over and over again.

It bears noting that, even if you have no known
disabilities today, that could change in a flash.  In
disability circles, those without disabilities are
referred to as the Temporarily Abled.




--- "Gray, Peter" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> > John W. Kelton
> 
> The _content_ of the HTML site is great, and I
> enjoyed it, but it was difficult even for me (and my
> vision is pretty good), because here at work I am
> using a 15" TFT screen with a resolution of 1600 x
> 1200, so the text was very small and I could not
> make it bigger (this is a well-known 'feature' of
> Internet Explorer). And of course the point for web
> sites is that you can't in principle know what kind
> of device / OS / screen resolution / browser window
> size / colour depth / etc your visitors are going to
> be using, so you need to avoid designing in ways
> that will by their very nature lock some people out.
> This is in addition to the legal requirement in both
> the US and the UK to make sites accessible to all.
> The coding of the site in question is very poor, but
> would be straightforward to fix, though obviously it
> is better to do things right in the first place.
> Remember I was talking about the minimum standards
> for accessibility, not the maximum. This is
> unfortunately all too common with museum and other
> websites. 
> 
> I don't have access to my bookmarks here, but one
> site I remember which meets a high level (much
> higher than the minimum I am talking about) of
> accessibility requirements and contains a large
> quantity of rich content is
> <http://www.theglasgowstory.com/> (I have no
> connection with this site). Note how the site will
> re-size to whatever size of browser window the user
> has, and how the text can be re-sized, so that, for
> example, someone with a visual impairment can have
> very large text and still have the full design in a
> full-screen browser window. The site design degrades
> gracefully in older browsers while still allowing
> all visitors access to the content (which is, after
> all, the purpose of a web site).
> 
> You might want to look at books by Jeffrey Zeldman
> ('Designing with web standards'), or take a look at
> www.zeldman.com (valid and 508 accessible); and take
> a look at anything by Eric Meyer on CSS
> (www.meyerweb.com). If you want to test sites for
> valid code go here: <http://validator.w3.org> (the
> World Wide Web Consortium's validator), and there's
> a useful accessibility checker here:
> <http://www.cynthiasays.com/> (I prefer this to
> Bobby, as the reports are more easily
> comprehensible).
> 
> I suppose people will now be wanting to see
> something I've done -- but I would point out I am a
> curator, not a graphic designer, and we have no
> budget here for web design companies. Still there's
> this which I put together in an afternoon last year:
> <http://tour.prestongrange.org/> which is the site
> supporting our mobile phone tour of Prestongrange
> Museum.
> 
> Best wishes
> 
> Pete
> -- 
> Peter M Gray
> Museums Officer
> 
> 
> 
> 
>
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