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Building Accessible Websites (With CD-ROM)
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Author: Joe Clark
List Price: $39.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 073571150X
Publisher: New Riders (11 October, 2002)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 41,527
Average Customer Rating: 4.38 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
Eye opening
An excellent volume, but I'm sure I've seen something very similar to that cover image somewhere before. Maybe it was on www.goat.cx?
Rating: 5 out of 5
Highly readable and recommended
Right up front, let me say that I usually find web usability books are a major pain to read. The authors normally set themselves up as "experts" and present all their opinions as undeniable facts. While you can get good information from their writings, I quickly tire of the tone of "I'm the expert". So why am I reading a book on web accessibility? Because I know it's good for me. It's a subject I don't know much about. And with this title, I was pleasantly surprised. This is a very readable book by an engaging writer, and it's a good mix of opinion, fact, standards, and practicality. It also helps that he doesn't much care for the "my opinion is fact" usability experts either. With the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, public entities have to address the issue of making their websites accessible to various groups of disabled individuals. Clark starts off by explaining how visually-disabled, hearing-disabled, learning-disabled, and physically-disabled people use computers and the web. He then explains in entertaining fashion how each type of element in your web page can be made accessible to the different devices that are used by the disabled. The suggestions are also broken down into beginning, intermediate, and advanced techniques so that developers at all levels of experience can take positive steps towards compliance with accessibility regulations. For Notes/Domino developers, you have the same issues to deal with as do web developers on other platforms. Since Domino applications on the web are often Notes applications rendered to HTML "on the fly", it's a little more difficult to exercise the total control that other types of web page coding involve. But you do have the "HTML" tag in the property box for each design element. By using that set of properties to add accessibility tags, you can go far in designing Domino apps that are friendly to the disabled. And if you work for a public organization, you may find that you have little choice but to comply. It might be a good idea to get started on the learning curve now. Conclusion
If you are responsible for maintaining an organizational website and either have to/want to address accessibility issues, this is the book you'll want to get. Not only will you learn the "whys" of accessibilities, but you'll learn the different level of "hows". Highly recommended.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Tiny, tiny font
This book has some wonderful information. However, I find it ironic how this book discusses accessibility and the book itself is not accessible! It is written in tiny, tiny font. I had to use a maginifying glass to read it! After struggling through a few chapters, I moved on to another book, Maximum Accessibility, with much larger font.
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