References for Chapter 9

Books

Joe Clark, Building Accessible Websites

Joe Clark is an outspoken accessibility advocate, who also knows a lot about building accessible sites. His book contains much useful practical advice, based in reality.

John M Slatin and Sharron Rush, Maximum Accessibility

John Slatin is himself blind, and the book includes accounts of his experiences trying to use sites that are not accessible, which provide motivation for the accessibility techniques described. This book also covers some of the legal requirements around the world, and has a chapter on accessibility and PDF.

Online Resources

Adobe - Accessibility Resource Center

Adobe's resources for making PDF and Flash (more) accessible. We don't discuss this in the book, but if you include these media in your sites, you can make them accessible, just as you can make the Web standard material accessible.

Tiresias - Colour Blindness

Guidelines and information about colour blindness, part of a much larger resource for people working in the field of visual disabilities. (It appears that work on this site was abandoned in October 2009, although it is still available.)

Vischeck: VischeckImage

Vischeck colour blindness simulator, can be used online or downloaded. Also has links to other related tools and information.

How to make figures and presentations that are friendly to color blind people

A useful, highly illustrated guide to colour blindness and the use of colours that can be seen by everyone, although not written for Web designers.

Accessible, Usable, Universal, & Stunning Web Designs | Accessites.org: Home Page

A site designed to showcase and award the developers and owners of accessible, usable, universal, and beautiful, standards compliant websites.

BBC - My Web My Way - Homepage

The BBC's guide to Web accessibility features and assistive technologies for users. Includes links and user reports from people with accessibility problems.

Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0

A W3C Working Draft which describes how best to make pages accessible in mobile devices. As a side-effect, most of this advice will help to make pages accessible in the wider sense.

Unobtrusive Javascript

This is a little Web-based course on using JavaScript in a way that does not interfere with accessibility.

How People with Disabilities Use the Web

A description of the way people with disabilities actually use the Web. Very helpful in concentrating the mind on why accessibility matters.

Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) - home page

The home of the W3C accessibility organization, from which you can find the relevant guidelines.