W3C has a new accessibility section. It does a nice job of unifying their accessibility content into one location. The home page has a great explanation of the three W's of accessibility. Why, What, and How. (Two W's and an H just doesn't have a nice ring to it.)

"The Web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, culture, location, or physical or mental ability. When the Web meets this goal, it is accessible to people with a diverse range of hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive ability." - Accessibility - W3C

Interested in testing the accessibility of your site? Here's a couple of free online tools that will get you started.

• Total Validator Service - Tests Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1 (1-3), WCAG2 (A-AAA), and Section 508
• EvalAccess - Tests WCAG1 (1-3)
• Section 508 web accessibility checker - As the name would suggest, tests Section 508
• Cynthia Says - Tests Section 508, and WCAG1 (1-3)

You might also try the Firefox Accessibility Extension by the Illinois Center for Information Technology Accessibility, or the Web Accessibility Toolbar by Vision Australia.

To say that people are starting to talk about accessibility on the web would be misleading. Some people have been talking about it for quite a while. What should be said is that people are starting to listen to talk about accessibility.  If you're interested in learning about accessibility, here are some people and organization you should try listening to.

• 456 Berea Street
• Accessibility Field Notes
• Accessites.org
• AlastairC
• Bruce Lawson's personal site
• Confusability
• Do It Myself Blog - Glenda Watson Hyatt
• Human Factors International, Inc.
• Jim Thatcher
• Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design
• Juicy Studio
• lifekludger
• mezzoblue
• Usability is No Longer Enough
• Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Highlights
• Web Axe - Practical Web Design Accessibility Tips
• What's New at Usability.gov
• and Thoughts on Design - because it's my list

You have your site setup properly, a beautiful design, perfect content... that's everything right? Do you have RSS feeds? Can people subscribe to your site? Quick, off the top of your head, what's your site's feed called? Do you know? What's the feeds URL? Is it available from any page in the site, or just the home page? Do you have multiple feeds? If so, where are they available from? Here are a few things you can do to make it easier for your users to subscribe to your site.

• Make sure your RSS feeds have easily identifiable names. This is configurable in a lot of content management systems (CMS).  "News" might make sense to you, but when your subscriber has multiple feeds they won't know who's "news" is whose. For a single feed I would suggest the site name. For multiple feed sites, I'd suggest the site name and an individual identifier like "site name - news" or "site name - blog".
• Make sure your feeds are easily available. If a site has a feed, but it can't be found, it's not benefiting you. It might makes sense to make the news feed accessible from the news page, and the blog feed from the blog. That's a reasonable organization. You might however, want to also make them all available from one unified location. I'd suggest the home page,  or a dedicated subscriptions page if you have a number of feeds available.
• Do your feeds work? Subscribe to all of your feeds, and check them regularly. Make sure that they work, and they display your content as expected. A surprising number of RSS feeds I see don't display properly, or have errors that don't allow them to be viewed at all.

Don't overlook the details of your site. It can be a little thing like a malfunctioning or poorly named RSS feed that keeps your from that one important contact you needed.

You might expect a high level of accessibility from a site called Usability.gov.  You might be disappointed. Sadly, I wasn't particularly surprised by my quick look into the accessibility of this site.

Age is definitely a factor. While the copyright is up to date, the fact that has custom style sheets for Internet Explorer (IE) 5 and newer, and 4.7 and older makes me think it's not a new design. With that code, I'd hope it was more than five years old. Regardless, it's showing its age.

Some of the low points of the site are:

• Absolutely horrible use of headings for structure.
• Use of images of text rather than text.
• Bad use of the hover pseudo-class making navigation awkward
• No use of the focus pseudo-class making  keyboard navigation all but impossible
• An unreasonable number of validation errors and warnings
• Invisible skip links, which don't work in IE.

This is one of those sites that seems to pass most cursory accessibility tests without actually being accessible. It follows the letter of Section 508 compliance, while throwing the spirit of the law out the window. That it does have skip links, but you can't see them and they don't work is a perfect example of this. It has the appearance of accessibility, without actual the benefit of accessibility.

Who cares about accessibility? The short answer is you should. If you don't, you're not alone. A lot of people don't give a lot of thought to accessibility, but they should too. Why should you worry about accessibility? For this discussion, let's leave the legal implications out entirely, they're important too, but that's another discussion. Let's just consider your audience. Who is your audience? Do you like your audience? How would you feel if I told you I was going to take some of them away? Lack of accessibility might be doing just that.

• Low color contrast? You could be losing the one in twelve adults that are color blind.
• No alt text? you're losing anyone who is visually impaired or has images turned off for bandwidth reasons.
• No captioning of audio? You've now lost anyone who has difficulty hearing.
• Didn't bother making keyboard navigation possible? You've lost anyone with manual dexterity problems, as well as people using some types of accessibility software.

I could go on. Each type of accessibility you ignore, is a portion of your audience that you aren't reaching. You'd never consider ignoring clients you talk to in person, but you're doing just that to your potential online clients.  Why accessibility? Because if you make your site accessible, you reach all of your audience.

I linked to Jim Thatcher's post Accessibility of the White House Web Site, so I thought it only fair to link to his update as well.

I have updated the report on the Accessibility of Whitehouse.gov because there have been significant improvements there. It is gratifying and encouraging. Specifically, I think it is fair to say that the major issues reported in that news item have been fixed. Furthermore, in the arena of machine detectable errors detected in a depth one scan, the White House site has gone from an average of three errors per page to an average on one per page in less than two months. Congratulations! - Web Accessibility News

My most recent project at Riven Design was a brand new Drupal site for Whitecap Custom Rods. The owners of WhitecapRods.com pride themselves on building rods "with an enthusiasm for excellence". It shows in their work, and I hope it shows in their site.

My business site, RivenDesign.com, has a new look. As well as the new style, I've improved the accessibility with better skip links and a better use of headings. It also has an updated version of Drupal.

There are two good accessibility discussions going on right now, and you need to be following them. The first is Glenda Watson Hyatt's Four Parties Contribute to an Accessible Blogosphere. Glenda is pushing for more accessibility in blogging platforms and on blogs themselves. This is an idea whose time has come. Blogs by design are dynamic and adaptable. Let's adapt them toward accessibility. The second discussion is accessibility in the US Government. This discussion is being driven by Jim Thatcher and Joe Dolson

• Accessibility of the White House Web Site
• Accessibility of Recovery.gov
• Postscript on Recovery.gov
• Obama’s Web Transparency: not for everybody.

I have also managed to put in my own two cents worth a couple of times.

• Accessible Recovery?
• NY Senate, Drupal, and Accessibility

The one tragic similarity that I'm seeing in these government site's being discussed is that they're all very close to being accessible, but they fall short. How close? Joe Dolson suggests that WhiteHouse.gov could be significantly improved by the addition of five short lines of CSS. By my count that's about 83 characters. The addition of that CSS wouldn't solve everything, but the other changes aren't much more significant. To come so close to being truly accessible, and still falling short. It's like running the perfect marathon and walking off the course a few feet short of the finish line.