About Accessibility
Good accessible design
These site illustrate a range of content and several approaches to accessible design:
The BBC Website
One of the world's largest websites, the BBC site has accessibility as a core design principal. Although some recent developments such as iPlayer are controversial, the BBC in general takes enormous care to ensure the site works well across a range of platforms and with most AT.
The RNIB Website
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the RNIB's extensive Xpedio backed website is a model of accessibility and usability providing excellent support for screenreaders and most AT across all common browsers and platforms.
The Official JK Rowling Site
The JK Rowling site is much celebrated for it's accessibility enabled Flash content which parallels the main site accurately. Further fallback content is available in the form of a text-only rendering which is always kept both faithful and current.
The Glenbow Museum
The Glenbow Museum site was developed using Macromedia Studio and maintained largely via Contribute. The site achieves WCAG AA conformance throughout and is frequently held up by Adobe as an example of how their tools can facilitate accessible content management, design and development.
Prisoner 4099
Prisoner 4099 is the winner of 2007 Jodi Awards for Web Accessibility. A number of young people with visual impairments worked with National Archives to produce the site, accessible archive material and a radio play based on the experiences of a Victorian young offender.
Top
Some accessibility sites are downright ugly, but the problem lies with those sites’ designers and not with accessibility, which carries no visual penalty.
Jeffrey Zeldman, Designing with Web Standards, 2003
Although serving the needs of people with disabilities should of course be a concern, the far wider issue – that accessibility is a matter of usability – has rarely been discussed. As designer professionals, we should be designing our content so it is globally accessible and meets the needs of as many people as is possible and practical given our specific circumstances, regardless of their abilities or the type of device they choose to access the Web
Andy Clarke, Transcending CSS: the fine art of web design, 2006
