"Luigi Donatello Asero" <
[email protected]> wrote in message
No such thing - and this is a rather vague and sloppy way of wording
things, so it's hard to see what's really being discussed here.
For one thing, there are no "disabled" people. There are people with
disabilities, but you can't lump them all together into one pot lile
this. Good accessibility for a blind user doesn't make the same
demands that accessibility for a poorly-sighted person might do, let
alone someone with motor control problems or autism. A totally blind
user might be using a screen reader and that benefits from some
additional descriptive markup, the partially sighted reader might be
able to read text for themself, so long as they can enlarge it
sufficiently and still get a reasonable scroll order. Fortunately
there are design techniques that help to meet all of these constraints
simultaneously - it's rare that improving accessibility for one group
would reduce it for others.
CSS is no guarantee of accessibility, and it's not even much help to
achieving it. What is useful is the "CSS mindset" when applied to
design. You can't achieve accessibility just by using <link
media="disabled" ... /> and a magic stylesheet that makes the page
accessible. And if you could do so, why wouldn't you serve that to all
users ? For presentation stylesheets, there _is_ a problem that making
it accessible for one group might make it worse for another. Although
individual users might be able to meet their needs by applying a user
stylesheet, we (as page designers) can't do this for them because we
don't know just what their needs are. There is no single group of
"disabled" people.
"CSS techniques" allow us a couple of useful avenues for accessible
design though. Mainly they separate content and presentation, so the
ability to easily offer a content-only version of the page can itself
be helpful. The most accessible page is often not the one with special
"disabled styling", but the one with all styling and CSS turned _off_.
This either simplifies things, or it allows the user to apply their
own styling - it's their disability, they're the best judge of it, and
they often understand best how styling can help. Maybe it's as simple
as mapping all red or green colours to different brightnesses, so as
to overcome red/green colour blindness.
The core of good CSS design is to strip presentation out of the
content, and to leve behind content that is still usable without any
CSS. Think about document order, getting the sections in a meaningful
sequence. Imagine using the page as a single long line of ticker-tape
and having to scroll back and forth through it - how easy is this ?
Can internal jump menus within the page help ?
Then there's the annotation aspect of usability. Use title attributes
generously (I hope I don't have to describe alt usage again !). Wrap
related items in <div>s and give the <div> a relevant title. Even
though you might not want this as a heading, it can help with
navigation around the page. You may even wish to use a "breadcrumb"
approach for the content of these titles. Get your spelling right too,
for most screen readers can pronounce their dictionary words better
than mis-spellings.
General design stuff: Put things on the page because they're useful,
not otherwise. Enough of the animated .gif eye-candy, the Flash
banners, the JS-only menus. You don't _need_ this stuff, it causes
problems, so don't do it.
Maybe you do need some complex Java applet client-side data browser
(sometimes these problems are just hard and their solutions are
complex). Then build an alternative if you have to, and you can't make
the mainstream route accesssible itself.
When it finally comes to CSS, the techniques are generally better
known. Use text size units that are easily user-scalable. Allow for
fluid layout on devices with unusual window sizes. All that good
stuff.
I cannot imagine any scenario (suggestions welcome!) where
"section508.css" is either a sensible intention for a CSS stylesheet,
or a sensible name for a generalised CSS stylesheet. Don't segregate
accessibility like this - build it into your mainstream styling.
Incidentally, I'd regard that as a poor page-usability wise.