Universal Design for Web Applications: Web Applications That Reach Everyone
Universal Design for Web Applications: Web Applications That Reach Everyone
Universal Design for Web Applications teaches you how to build websites that are more accessible to people with disabilities and explains why doing so is good business. It takes more work up front, but the potential payoff is huge — especially when mobile users need to access your sites.
You’ll discover how to use standards-based web technologies — such as XHTML, CSS, and Ajax, along with video and Flash — to develop applications for a wide range of users and a variety of devices, including the mobile Web. You’ll also learn specifics about this target audience, especially the key over-50 age group, whose use of the Web is rapidly growing.
With this book, you will:Learn the importance of metadata and how it affects images,
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Complete Overview of Universal Design for Accessibility,
Universal Design for Web Applications: Web Applications That Reach Everyone covers all of the latest techniques and related standards for designing universally accessible websites. The text gives a very broad and complete overview with references for taking a deeper dive into any particular area. Up-to-date coverage mentions AJAX, RIA(rich internet applications), SilverLight, Flex, and JavaFX but very superficially since the goal of this book is to inform and guide you in creating highly accessible web content. Code snippets displaying XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript help demonstrate the discussed techniques. Topics include: proper use of CSS, semantic HTML, and Javascript; alternate text for images, links, and labels; captioning for audio and video; functional descriptions for images used as buttons; and how to structure menus to allow for proper tabbing and hot-keys. Additional items include coverage of screen readers, screen magnifiers, and comparison to using mobile devices such as phones which produce a very challenging environment for accessible designs. Also included is a list of tools for inspecting, reporting, and evaluating your designs for accessibility. I recommend Universal Design if you’re looking for a complete guide to creating very accessible web designs. Keep in mind that in order to take full advantage of the this book you will also need good references for whatever tools/languages you are using to design/create your website such as CSS, XHTML, JavaScript, Flex, etc.
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|Great summary of design topics,
Universal Design for Web Applications flows between the history of design principles and problems, current best practices and a look at what’s on the horizon for design implementation.
The subjects of web accessibility standards and organizations, with which the book opens, are always the driest for me. I think this has more to do with the daunting tasks these organizations undertake than anything. But, Chisholm and May handled these topics swiftly and summarized the disabilities, guidelines and organizations in a short and tidy chapter.
One of this book’s primary strengths is the clean examples used throughout for topics like document-level metadata, web forms, and the ever-problematic menubars. Anyone tired of searching through forums for bits of scripts, HTML or CSS examples will appreciate these easily adaptable examples.
The hot topics of video, Ajax and WAI_ARIA, and RIA implementation are all handled without demonizing any technology. Especially helpful are the discussions of designing for mobile devices and keyboard support for users not using a mouse.
Overall this book is designed not to be an exhaustive resource for any one design topic, but a useful survey of many of these topics, which comes in handy when you get bogged down in the details.
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