Is designing for accessibility a burden or a benefit? "Universal Design for Web Applications" demonstrates how building a website to accommodate people with physical and learning disabilities makes marketing sense. It takes more work upfront, but the potential payoff is huge - especially when mobile users need to work with your sites. You'll learn how to use standards - based web technologies such as XHTML, CSS, and Ajax, along with new uses for video, Flash, and PDF to develop applications for a wide range of users and a variety of devices, including the mobile web. You'll also learn about the target audience - and why so many of them are in the key over-50 age group that accounts for 30% of web usage and growing. This book will help you: appreciate the importance of meta data, and how it affects images, headings, and other design elements; build forms that accommodate cell phones, screen readers, word prediction, and more; create visual designs using color and text that work for a variety of situations and people; build tables that present information without spatial cues; design Ajax-driven social networking applications that are easily accessible by the disabled; provide audio with transcriptions, and video that includes captions and audio descriptions; discover assistive technology support for Rich Internet Application technologies such as Flash, Flex, and Silverlight; and, learn the value of having an accessibility evangelist on your design team. Accessibility has spawned several innovations in recent years. "Universal Design for Web Applications" provides a road map for design so you can produce applications that function better, are easier to maintain, and benefit a wide range of people.

About the Author
Wendy Chisholm is a consultant, developer, author, and speaker on the topic of universal design. As co-editor of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) and then staff at the World Wide Web Consortium, she's worked with people around the globe to make the web accessible. Wendy consults with market leaders such as Microsoft, Adobe and Google, integrating universal design concepts into their tools and technologies.Matt May is a developer, technologist, and accessibility advocate who is responsible for working internally and externally with Adobe product teams and customers to address accessibility in Adobe products, ensure interoperability with assistive technologies, and make customers aware of the many accessibility features that already exist in Adobe products.


Book Information
ISBN 9780596518738
Author Wendy Chisholm
Format Paperback
Page Count 179
Imprint O'Reilly Media
Publisher O'Reilly Media