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Accessibility and Public Accommodation

This article from the Christian Science Monitor brings up a rather interesting question about states meeting ADA requirements. The article specifically addresses the need for accessibility in public accommodations — physical buildings. The conclusion drawn in the article is that states should meet Federal standards.

Many states and local governments do voluntarily comply with the provisions of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. They recognize that when it comes to their websites, maximum accessiblity by constituents is critical. With the trend toward e-government applications — which save both constituents and government staff time and money — access is doubly important. For these government agencies, accessibility makes good business sense. What I find perplexing is that commercial entities don’t feel the same way.

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Zeldman's Section 508 Presentation

As usual, Zeldman is right on target in his Accessibility and Section 508 presentation. He touches on a couple of topics I’d like to expand on at length in future postings.

  1. Dual use design. If done properly you shouldn’t have to create a separate accessible version of your site.
  2. If you’re looking for a business case to justify accessibility, think of Google as a blind user. Accessibility and web standards will also make your site more search engine friendly.

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Using Our Brains

Wired has an interesting article (“Tranforming Thoughts Into Deeds”) about new technologies to assist individuals such as quadriplegics use their brain waves to manipulate computers. While the process is risky and expensive, it also sounds interesting. Also interesting is the estimate of the size of the quadriplegic market — $2 billion, 160,000 people. That’s a huge market.
Read the full article.

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Exporting Word to xHTML

I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently marveling over Microsoft Word’s complete inability to generate clean xHTML, or even clean HTML for that matter. It is the year 2004 after all — you would think a company with Microsoft’s resources would be able to figure this stuff out.

Microsoft’s latest offering, Word 2003, features the ability to export to numerous formats including XML and two varieties of HTML (filtered and regular). I have to admit that I held out some small hope that ‘filtered’ would produce the sort of clean code we’ve all been waiting for. No luck, the resulting HTML still included embeded ‘mso’ class references on every element. I can understand, and even appreciate, the applications attempt to generate a document specific stylesheet. I’d appreciate it even more if I could turn that ‘feature’ off.
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