What's this about?

You cannot discriminate. If you want to publish information on the web, you have to make sure it is accessible to everyone, regardless of any visual, mobility, or cognitive impairment. Of course, "everyone" covers a huge range of abilities and issues.

Nonetheless, accessibility is also good for users not sitting at a PC with a mouse. PDAs, Tablets and Third-Generation mobile phones all want to access your content. Not to mention all those other internet-aware devices which are predicted to swamp us soon. Anyone got a fridge that talks to your supermarket yet?

Oh, and very much not least, lets not forget those unsung heroes of Internet usability: the spiders. Those clever little robots the search engines send out to crawl down your site, so that they can index every nook and cranny.

If you make your site inaccessible, the spiders wont be able to crawl, and your search engine visibility will diminish.

Compliance Statement

I've tried to make this site WAI AAA rated. But this rating is subjective, and for the non-subjective bits, there are no free site-wide validation tools.

So I can only really claim that I've tried. In reality, this site is probably only AA+ … mainly AAA, with the odd drop down to AA.

Standards Bodies

W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
W3C guidelines for making content accessible to all users. This is a technology independent.
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
W3C guidelines for web browsers, including specific guidelines for achieving A, AA or AAA accessibility rankings.
Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act
The US 508 law, though you might prefer to look at a Summary of the 508 Web Accessibility standards
Disability Rights Commission
The UK's authority on disability rights. Though it is short on actual advice, and demonstrates that being AAA accessibility rated is a very subjective rating. Personally, the leading (inter-line spacing) is much to small for clear readability. Bring AAA also doesn't protect you from ugliness.

Accessibility Tools

Web Accessibility (IE) Toolbar
Toolbar for Internet Explorer that makes it as good as Opera for investigating accessibility.
Review of Free, Online Accessibility Tools
From the excellent WebAIM site, this reviews the major accessibility assessment tools, and discusses there use.
Bobby Accessibility Assessment Tool
Way too much emphasis is placed on Bobby. Too many of the guidelines are simply not machine-checkable. It's all to easy to whiz your page through Bobby.
HiSoftware
Commercial tools for ensuring accessibility and usability, including extensions to the popular development tools, and site-wide rather than just page-based validation.
Vischeck
Colour blindness simulator that knows its Protanope from its Tritanope.

Accessibility Guides & Discussions

Drive to Accessibility
30 Day programme to make your website a much more accessible place. I especially like the "Tips by …" indexing, so that you can see what is the benefit is, and where to apply it: by person, by disability, by design principle, by web browser, or by publishing tool.
WebAIM (Accessibility in Mind)
Excellent accessibility education and support site (note the review of tools in this site above). Note their discussion on Acrobat PDF file accessibility.
Accessibility and Search Engine Optimisation
Whole collection of articles on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and Accessibility, and how the two interlink.
Making Connections Unit
Interesting articles on practical accessibility issues, from typography, via the accessibility of PDF file, to how to make non-text elements accessible.
WATS.ca
Canadian Web Accessibility Testing agency with a useful resource list.
Smack the Mouse
Low volume by high usefulness articles on accessibility issues.
WebStandards.org
Accessibility would be a great deal easier if everyone conformed to standards, preferably the same ones. WebStandards.org is committed to promoting this perfect world.

Accessibility Examples

Peepo
Site for people with Cognitive Disabilities.