Universal Design for Web Applications: Web Applications That Reach Everyone

by Wendy Chisholm, Matt May

Universal Design for Web Applications teaches you how to build websites that are more accessible to people with disabilities and explains why doing so is good business. It takes more work up front, but the potential payoff is huge -- especially when mobile users need to access your sites.
You'll discover how to use standards-based web technologies -- such as XHTML, CSS, and Ajax, along with video and Flash -- to develop applications for a wide range of users and a variety of devices, including the mobile Web. You'll also learn specifics about this target audience, especially the key over-50 age group, whose use of the Web is rapidly growing.
With this book, you will:
Learn the importance of metadata and how it affects images, headings, and other design elements
Build forms that accommodate cell phones, screen readers, word prediction, and more
Create designs using color and text that are effective in a variety of situations
Construct tables that present information without spatial cues
Design Ajax-driven social networking applications that people with disabilities can access
Provide audio with transcriptions and video that includes captions and audio descriptions
Discover assistive technology support for Rich Internet Application technologies such as Flash, Flex, and Silverlight
Universal Design for Web Applications provides you with a roadmap to help you design easy-to-maintain web applications that benefit a larger audience.

Genres: Design, Website Design, Programming, Nonfiction

198 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really good book and the authors are awesome. It’s just a little bit outdated 2019.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides a decent high-level overview of why writing properly formed semantic HTML is important from both accessibility and technology standpoints. Most of the information it covers isn't new (the Web Standards Project has been pushing semantic markup for years), and a lot of it is available around the web. But if you are new to the subject of web accessibility; if you think accessibility is something that you can fix up after the original code base is done; or if you work with developers who feel that learning to write HTML properly isn't worth their time (and you can actually convince them to read the book--or even just the chapters related to markup), I guarantee you (or they) will learn something.

It does not cover ARIA in much depth; given that ARIA support in most screen reading software is still poor it's probably not a good idea to rely on that anyway.

[Eitan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the "soft" chapters that dealt with philosophy and concepts. I feel weak when it comes to that, so it was a good read, and an excellent review of where UD is headed and how people who care about it could influence decision makers.

As for the more technical chapters, I am not very webby at the moment, so I don't have immediate use for it. But I know I will re-open this book next time I am involved in a web project.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is a little out-of-date in some discussions of what's available for accessibility but the concepts in the book are still important. In some respects the world of web design that has changed the most, mobile, has yet to address the issues raised in the book. This does not offer solutions but ways of thinking about design that will be inclusive.

[Kaloyan K. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Complete waste of my time and money, I learned nothing from this book. Although it is about the web it is as if it is written in pre-Internet era -- almost all the stuff in it are already known to both novice- and intermediate-level web designers and developers.

[AHolly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't learn a whole lot from this book and it doesn't get too too technical but for anyone new to the subject, it would probably be a great read