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Web Standards to the rescue. One NASA Look and Feel CSS TEMPLATES
Why Web Standards?
508c and Accessibility
Being a government agency, accessibility is one of our top priorities. In this area, Web Standards wins any debate over traditional layout techniques hands down. The goals of 508c and Web Standards are one and the same: Making sure our websites are accessible and usable to the largest audience. I will not go into detail here on the rules of 508c, or how to become 508c compliant, but know that approaching a website from a Web Standards development point of view you are practically 98% of the way to being 508c compliant.
In Jeffrey Zeldman's book, he recommends two books on this subject. "Building Accessible Web Sites, by Joe Clark (New Riders: 2002)" and "Constructing Accessible Web Sites (Glasshaus: 2002)". I have not read these books yet, but I plan to in the near future. After I do, I may expand this section to include some best practices for Web Standards websites and 508c compatibality.
The concept of building a web site that separates structure from presentation naturally builds a document that falls right in line with 508c compliance. There are of course some things that we must still do to be compliant, but most of the difficult stuff is taken care of.
Web Standards websites are especially kind to screen reader users. With the lack of spacer gifs and bulky mark-up, these users can follow the logical document flow giving them a much more natural web experience than the one most of them currently struggle with. It is true that the leading screen reader technology companies have made great advances in recent years regarding traditional layout dictation, but this does not mean we as developers should leave it up to those companies to fix our lack of proper document structure. There are plenty of web enabled devices that will never go to the extremes that those software developers have, and for those devices, traditional websites will be left behind (mobile technology anyone?).
If you plan on using Javascript, make use of the <noscript> tags for those users who don't have Javascript enabled, and for those devices that do not support Javascript. Use the DOM (Document Object Model) when writing your scripts. The DOM is beyond the scope of this discussion, but there are plenty of resources online.
One more thing I would like to mention. When writing alt tags make sure they have MEANING. If the image is linked, include the link location in the alt tag. An alt tag of "Picture of a book" does not give any clues to a screen reader that it is a link, or where that link might take them.
Ok, enough of this 508c stuff: MONEY TALKS
Why Web Standards?
NASA Fact
Insert a NASA fact here. Feel free to use a server side include or a back-end rotater.
- NASA Official: Bob Peirce
- Curator: Karen Smale
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