Building Accessible Websites

by Joe Clark

Using a strategic approach to the issues in a journalistic style, this book will be a foundation for how people think about this issue going forward-the first book people would read on the topic, before delving into the minutiae of the moment. With lawsuits and human-rights complaints proliferating, and with simple awareness of accessibility percolating through the industry, soon it will be hard to find a web shop that won't be producing accessible sites, whether it presently has the experience and know-how or not. Government mandates, lawsuits from disability groups, more non-English speaking web users, and an increasing population of Web-enabled devices make this a vital topic.

Genres: Nonfiction

415 pages, Paperback

First published October 11, 2002

Reviews

[Craig Cecil · Rating 1 out of 5]

Written in 2002, this book is still considered the gold standard in web accessibility. I have no idea why. What Joe Clark has accomplished here is to spread about 20 pages of good accessibility information across a 400 page miasma. Most web designers don't care about the history of captioning and transcription systems--we just want the facts, man. What should we do, and what should we avoid. Best practices. Etc. That info is in here, but you have to cut a swath through the verbosity to find much of it. Or just read the last page of each chapter, which summarizes the previous 40-odd pages in six or less sentences. Save yourself the price of the book and scan through the entire text of the book online. In the end, Building Accessible Websites is an inaccessible read.

[Miguel Frias · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book covers several useful topics related to accessibility but in a very tedious way.

Summary:
- Use alt and title in all media elements like img, object, applet (does anyone still use it?), or any other thing, including inputs.
- Use HTML property: accesskey.
- Use HTML property: accesstab

[Murray · Rating 3 out of 5]

A seminal book on promoting standards and accessibility in websites. Written in a somewhat caustic tone, but gets its points across with good examples and rebuttals to common excuses for practices that make the web hard for many to use.