If the bad news is that sooner or later everyone is disabled and you need to ensure universal, immediate access to your content for people who may not be able to see the screen, hear the audio or touch the keyboard, the good news is that the principles of accessible design are also, for the most part, principles of good design. If your site doesn't measure up to these guidelines, you should worry about losing all of your readers, not just the ones defined by a disability. These guidelines are adapted from a list first published by the Trace Research and Development Center of the University of Wisconsin. They have been revised and reissued by the W3C WAI with a detailed, comprehensive and well-documented set of practices that define Web accessibility. In addition to authoring guidelines, the WAI is preparing guidelines for browsers and page creation toolmakers.
Accessible design is, by necessity, media-independent design.
This message should sound familiar to any publisher wrestling with the issues of media-independent repositories. In other words, separate structure from presentation. Further requirements, to provide alternate means of navigation and formatting, are not so different from the requirements for any multiformat publishing. 2000 ZD Inc. All rights reserved.