Accessablity

Spent the better part of today following up on accessability. After reading through
W3C., HTML Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0,
W3C Note 6 November 2000,
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/
html and css guidelines I think I have a feel for what is required and a large headache. Remembering back to NED11 and the first tables site we made I would hate to have to go back and make it accessable, would go cross eyed in the process and that was only a very simple site. I can see why many (probably most ) existing tables sites are not compliant. The examples were very eye opening.
Much of the rest of the recommendations made sense, especially with the examples they provided. Complying maybe time consuming but not impossible (thankfully) and just paying attention to images, the use of instead of text and alt tags, long desc etc and using valid html and css goes a long way to creating assessible pages.

Cynthia D. Waddell and Kevin Lee Thomason Is Your Site ADA-Compliant ...or a Lawsuit-in-Waiting? http://www.icdri.org/CynthiaW/is_%20yoursite_ada_compliant.htm 1998 was an excellent article on why compliance came to being, how to start etc. I actually started here and followed their links to W3C.

Krug's advise in Don't make me think! on the subject of accessibility was also very straightforward:
Use CSS
Add appropriate alt text to every image.
make your forms work with screen readers.
Create "skip to main content" link at the beginning of each page. A point not mentioned in W3C.
Make all content accessible by keyboard.
Don't use javascript without agood reason.
Use client side image maps.
Fix the usability problems that confuse everyone eg error messages. Test often as even if your site is compliant according to the guidelines it still may not be usable.
Plus read some good texts on the subject.