Universal Design for Web Applications

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 metadata, 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 * 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.