Recent Accessibility Links | September 9, 2003

• A Web Designer's Guide to JAWS
• Assistive Device Behaviour Chart
• Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility
• Accessibility testing on a budget
• Accessibility and Internationalization
• RNIB web access centre

Talking about the RNIB site, while the site provides lot's of very useful information to web designers on how to make sites more accessible, the site's designers seem to have disregarded many of the RNIB's own suggestions. When the site relaunched in June, it caused a bit of a storm amongst the accessibility/CSS web logging community.

• RNIB redesign a disappointment - Simon Wilson
• The new RNIB site in CSS - Simon Wilson
• RNIB redesign does not go far enough - accessify
• New RNIB site - Tom Gilder
• RNIB open letter
• RNIB - bite back
• Coment from Julie Howell

Technical problems aside, one of the main issues I have with the RNIB site is it's design. One argument I hear all the time against accessible design is that accessible sites are ugly. While this doesn't need to be so, the RNIB site does nothing to disprove this widely held belief. While it's relatively easy to teach web designers the technical methods of making a site accessible, until web designers start to see accessibility and creativity are not mutually exclusive, things will continue to be an uphill struggle.

Maybe what we need is something like the CSS Zen garden but focussing on accessibility instead.