Accessibility is a general term used to describe the degree to which a product (e.g., device, service, environment) is accessible by as many people as possible, and the ventures to produce accessible products and services. Accessibility is often used to focus on people with disabilities and their right of access to entities, often through use of assistive technology.
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User Modeling for Adaptive and Adaptable Software Systems
Universal Usability requires that user interfaces accommodate users with a wide variety of expertise and knowledge. Moreover, individual users' needs and preferences change as they use a software system. Systems that guide the user through an evolutionary learning process or adapt the user interface to the user provide a solution to this challenge. This paper introduces the techniques, highlights several examples of systems that implement them and provides guidelines for practitioners who wish to develop adaptive and adaptable interfaces.
Kules, Bill. University of Maryland (2000). Design>User Interface>Accessibility>Universal Usability
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This is a simple 'wizard tool' to create a User Style Sheet. These can be extremely useful for students with visual impairments, scotopic senstivity or visual processing difficulties such as some forms of dyslexia. User Style Sheets are a client-side application of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), they can be used to overide the presentation of HTML based web pages. They can be extremely powerful in enforcing the way in which the user desires a web page to be presented. You can set option of text font, size and colour. The font colour of hyperlinks etc. The user style sheets can be used in Internet Explorer, Opera and Mozilla.
TechDis (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Software
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User-Centred Design (UCD): 6 Methods
Learn all about user-centered design, the methods available to you, and how and when they should be employed.
Fidgeon, Tim. Webcredible (2005). Design>User Centered Design>Accessibility>Usability
#27420
Access keys are a contentious area of accessibility, as they can sometimes clash with the shortcut keys used by user agents. One method to get around this problem is to allow users to define their own access keys. This post suggests a PHP class that allows users to define their own access keys.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2006). Design>Web Design>Accessibility
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User-Defined Style Sheets and Accessibility
How you can set your own stylesheet for greater accessibility; another lecture/essay.
Bartlett, Kynn. HTML Writers Guild (1999). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>CSS
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Users with special needs who are not sufficiently visually impaired to require assistive technologies can still be frustrated by poor contrast, problematic colour schemes, or tiny, unreadable text. Up to 10% of men are colour blind to some extent, and the increasing number of older users are less likely to have 20/20 vision than those designing the pages.
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Using an Access-Centered Design to Improve Accessibility: A Primer for Technical Communicators 
This article discusses accessibility barriers as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and provides a basic primer on how technical communicators can remove these barriers during their Web design process and test to ensure the barriers were removed. The article focuses on 10 common barriers to a meaningful experience for people with disabilities, barriers that a technical communicator can consider when designing online information. Working on accessibility issues before online information goes live will help to reduce re-work and re-design and can save a lot of headaches for a technical communicator.
Roberts, Linda Enders. Technical Communication Online (2006). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility
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Using Customized Sounds Effectively
Learn about the advantages of, as well as common tools for creating customizable sounds.
Microsoft (2002). Design>Accessibility>Software>Audio
#22968
Using Opera to Check for Accessibility
There are a lot of tools available to check your Web content for accessibility. Some tools are Web-based (such as WAVE 3.0). Other tools are stand-alone software products that you install on your hard drive. One tool that you may have overlooked is the Opera Web browser. Opera is not an accessibility validator—it's a Web browser—but it can act like an accessibility validator if you know how to use it that way. In fact, it's one of the best available. This article explains why.
WebAIM (2003). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Software
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UUGuide: Practical Design Guidelines for Universal Usability
Even if technology is made more affordable and accessible, it still must be usable by a wide variety of people – experts and novices, abled and disabled – using a wide variety of hardware and software – old and new, text-based and audio/video. Universal usability has thus become another related, but distinct area of research. This web site seeks to identify some of the major issues faced by hardware and software designers who wish to build with universal usability in mind. The Table of Contents to the left contains a list of papers on topics related to universal usability organized into two groups. The first group, User Communities, identifies some of the groups of people who require special considerations when designing hardware and software. The second group, Hardware and Software, looks at the problem from the other direction and identifies hardware and software solutions to usability issues that effect a number of groups. All of the papers were written as resources to provide guidelines for practitioners.
Browne, Hilary, Jeff Carver and Erica Kolatch. Universal Usability (2000). Design>Usability>Accessibility>Universal Usability
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A mailing list where web page developers can get assistance for having their web pages tested by visually impaired users.
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Il Vero Costo Dell'accessibilità Web
La realizzazione dei contenuti incide profondamente sul costo di un sito accessibile. L'uso di standard consolidati e di tutti i tag ed attributi dell'(X)Html accessibile la rende però una soluzione vantaggiosa, poiché ne riduce la successiva manutenzione e revisione.
Volpon, Antonio. FucinaWeb (2002). (Italian) Design>Web Design>Accessibility
#19369
It's important for Web designers to have a basic understanding of the mechanics of human visual perception. To the extent that your pages are 'easy on the eyes,' readers will find your site more inviting and more readable. Conversely, pages that visually overstimulate a reader are not only more difficult to read, but much more likely to result in eyestrain, fatigue, even headaches (none of which is particularly popular among readers).
Sullivan, Terry. All Things Web (1996). Design>Usability>Accessibility>Web Design
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Whenever I ask a large group of people whether or not they have a visual disability, very few of them answer that they do. Then I ask whether or not anyone uses any assistive technology to overcome their visual disability. Most people are unsure what I mean. Invariably, though, as I look out across the group, I see many of them--often a majority--using an assistive technology for their vision at that very moment.
WebAIM (2004). Design>Accessibility>Visual
#22967
Visual vs. Cognitive Disabilities
Graphics are not directly accessible to people who are blind, yet graphics can be beneficial (in some cases necessary) to individuals with cognitive disabilities. Are these two disability types at odds with each other? How can Web developers reconcile the needs of these two very different audiences? Read more about the apparent conflicting interests in our feature article.
Bohman, Paul, Shane Anderson and Sachin Pavithran. WebAIM (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Universal Usability
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Visually Challenged Users and Need for a Universally Accessible Web Site
Visually impaired people suffer from no faults of their own. This is quite worthy of consideration that a little more efforts toward adoption of certain features in your web site can help them retrieve information in the desired manner. Their ease of accessibility to your web site will not go unrewarded; they can well augment your business interests by turning into your most valuable customers.
Azam, Rahbre. Amateur Writerz (2008). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Universal Usability
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Voice Interfaces: Assessing the Potential
Visual interfaces are inherently superior to auditory interfaces for many tasks. The Star Trek fantasy of speaking to your computer is not the most fruitful path to usable systems.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2003). Design>Usability>Accessibility>Voice
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Voice-Enable Your Web Page with Multimodal 4.3.2
Become fluent in X+V, today's versatile Web markup language (WML). X+V, short for XHTML+Voice, is a Web markup language that is comprised of voice and visual elements used for developing multimodal applications. This article provides the novice developer of Multimodal X+V, Web pages, and handheld devices with a process for creating and testing an X+V application. This article uses the IBM® Multimodal Toolkit 4.3.2 running on WebSphere® Studio Site Developer (Site Developer) or on WebSphere Studio Application Developer (Application Developer) 5.1.2.
Celi, Miriam. IBM (2005). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Audio
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Voluntary Product Accessibility Template
The purpose of the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template is to assist Federal contracting officials in making preliminary assessments regarding the availability of commercial Electronic and Information Technology products and services with features that support accessibility. It is assumed that offerers will provide additional contact information to facilitate more detailed inquiries.
Adobe (2002). Resources>Accessibility>Web Design
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Niniejsza książka odpowiada na dwa pytania. Pierwsze brzmi: 'Dlaczego powinienem uczynić swoją stronę WWW bardziej dostępną?' Jeżeli nie masz strony w sieci, ta książka nie jest dla Ciebie. Drugie pytanie to 'Jak mogę uczynić moją stronę bardziej dostępną?' Jeżeli nie zostaniesz przekonany przez odpowiedź na pierwsze pytanie, nie będziesz zainteresowany odpowiedzią na drugie.
Pilgrim, Mark. Dive Into Accessibility (2002). (Polish) Books>Web Design>Accessibility
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W3C/WAI「ウェブ･コンテンツ･アクセシビリティ･ガイドライン 1.0」
W3Cが勧告として公開している「Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0」をソシオメディア監修「ウェブ・アクセシビリティ〜すべての人に優しいウェブ・デザイン」（アスキー）にて日本語訳したもの。
Sociomedia (2003). (Japanese) Design>Web Design>Accessibility
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WAVE is a free web accessibility evaluation tool provided by WebAIM. It is used to aid humans in the web accessibility evaluation process. Rather than providing a complex technical report, WAVE shows the original web page with embedded icons and indicators that reveal the accessibility of that page.
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In order to encourage vendors of non-W3C technologies to include accessibility features in their technologies, and in recognition of emerging technologies that are beneficial for the Web, WCAG 2.0 is technology neutral. Rather than list each technology that the guidelines cover, WCAG 2.0 introduces the concept of a baseline. This post attempts to explain what is meant by this baseline concept.
Lemon, Gez. Juicy Studio (2006). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
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WCAG 2.0 Preview: So What's New?
This article reviews the new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.0 and was published in SPIN Magazine. The article summaries the new guidelines and identifies key revisions and changes made to the original WCAG version 1.0.
Palmer, Mark. User Vision (2007). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
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WCAG 2.0: The New W3C Accessibility Guidelines Evaluated
WCAG 2.0, the second version of the W3C's accessibility guidelines are soon to be released - find out what accessibility experts at Webcredible think of these new guidelines.
Moss, Trenton. Webcredible (2006). Design>Web Design>Accessibility
