Ulysses wrote:
WOW! I've been in web publishing since '95 and it never occured to me to optimise a site for less-abled people.
I'm impressed, and will learn how to do this and enable all appropriate sites in future. But then again, what's not appropriate! Every site should be optimised for this.
I know this post is a couple of years old, but I guess most people are in the same boat, never having considered accessibility issues. Remember that many countries have legislation that requires some websites to be accessible to various user groups (visual or other impairments, physical disabilities and even cognitive impairment in some cases). It's worth checking out - see the
W3C's policy page to check the situation in your country. For how to do it, google "web design accessibility" or similar, or check out the W3C's
Web Accessibility Initiative.
While I think everyone should consider these at least a little, you should def think about this if you're running a govt/local authority site, charity site or any form of educational site (which will probably have additional legislation such as the UK's Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001).
Essentially a case can be made that anyone who provides "goods or services" should ensure they are not discriminating against any one user group.
I enjoyed finding out about this stuff - but then I'm one of those who's always soaking up more info. Jack of all trades, master of none, that's me. For instance, check out
http://colorfilter.wickline.org/ to see a colour-blindness simulator, easy way to find out how some of your users
actually see your site!
Using a CMS such as CMSMS
should mean that much accessibility work is already done for you, but don't just assume that - and there's a lot of other stuff that template designers & web authors need to consider than no CMS can do for you.