[.ca] Building Accessible Websites (ISBN 073571150X)

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.

Since it is not an option, you must do it:
In the new environment where customer service rules, all web masters must consider the needs of those whose senses are not within the ordinary norms. Furthermore, the federal government has a great deal to say about what is required of web sites when it comes to servicing the handicapped. Therefore, it is necessary for all web programmers to learn what the rules are and how to most efficiently satisfy them. That is the purpose of this book and the author is successful, although in a very preachy way. Two pleasing points are that the author scoffs at those who play semantic games in describing people with handicaps, heaping particular scorn on the term "handicapable." People who are blind or deaf simply will not experience the web the same way as those with those senses and short of eliminating that medical limitation, nothing can be done about that. Which is the second of the points. It is absurd to try to make the experience equivalent to that of a sighted or hearing person, so the focus should be on making it as functional as possible within their field of experience. While much has been done in terms of screen readers and closed captioning, there is still a lot of weaknesses in the technology that replaces the actions of one sense with another. Clark is very clear about those weaknesses, pointing out that some things are just not possible, so the emphasis should be on what is possible. Further points of emphasis are in the usability testing of the site, where it is difficult to perform such tests without using someone whose handicap is what the structure is supposed to overcome. As is the case with all other areas of software development, including the accessibility must be part of the initial design, as making the adaptations later is much more difficult and expensive. Hard data concerning the numbers of people with the various handicaps that access the web is very difficult to find. However, there are two facts that cannot be disputed. The first is that it is significant enough so that they cannot be ignored, even if the law was silent on the issue. Customers are too valuable to ignore any of them and the size of the group will continue to grow. The largest growing segment of the regular population is the elderly, most of which suffer vision and hearing problems. This group is also moving to the web at a very rapid pace and they generally have a lot of money to spend, so it simply makes good e-business sense to design your site so that they can use it with ease. To do anything else is poor business practice, and I recommend reading this book as a fundamental part of your business on the Internet.

Well-Structured, Useful and Practical:
Joe Clark's detractors are the sort of critics who would gleefully detract from anyone who shows the poor taste to believe what they say and say what they mean. It's far easier to construct a rambling, nattering bleat of discontent than it is to actually write a book on web accessibility. The book is structured to support multiple levels of interest and involvement. If you want to understand the entire history of web accessibility, it's there for the reading, but if you'd prefer to skip the narrative and get to the nitty-gritty how-to, the road signs are clear. In addition, the tools are there for proficiency levels from the first-time web designer who is willing and able to contribute only 101% toward accommodating the disabled to the veteran developer for whom 200% is still insufficient. Clark makes it clear that not everyone is so well-informed, so esoteric, and so single-minded as he; nor should they be. He merely makes it possible to try. Accommodating, flexible, and wry -- much like the best of the Web -- "Building Accessible Websites" is as many things to as many people as such a book could possibly be.

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.

Good content, poorly written.:
First of all, I would like commend Mr. Clark for addressing this topic at all. Accessibility is an important in computer development. While the content seems to be accurate, and quite detailed to the point that you could use the information in the book to actually build a site with it, the writing is so poor and very difficult to read. Mr. Clark needs to throw away his thesaurus and hire an editor. He would be better off delivering his message in a clear and concise manner, and spend less time writing in a very "fancy" way that would be better suited for thesis papers rather than a book targeted towards the masses. This heavy style of writing makes it a difficult book to digest while riding the subway. Pretentious - the one word I would use to describe the overall style of writing. This really put me off as a reader, making the content even more difficult to absorb. (In one case, the author actually explains his choice of word, "indention" as opposed to the more commonly used "indentation". His explanation seemed to imply that everyone who uses "indentation" is clearly *wrong*; two online dictionaries confirmed that "indentation" could have been used.) Of course, my opinion that the writing of this book is pretentious could also come from actually having met the author. Read this book only if you really have the time to struggle through all his big words to get at the meaning behind them.