Making Web accessible for everyone: how to.

Modern Web is developing at a very fast pace, therefore it’s very hard to find sites that would assure accessibility for everybody, including the people with disabilities. In order to assure the accessibility for everybody, the University of Illinois launched the HTML/XHTML Best Practices site.

The site is a set of practices that are used on the University’s site to provide support  for everybody on the university’s site. Now it’s the place where all the Internet meets to learn on making a website accessible. The HTML/XHTML Best Practices Site was made with the following purposes in mind: it must benefit the people with disabilities in the first place, bring benefits to web developers and all other users, and in the end, encourage the creation of sites that would support automated testing.

The old approach of making a site “accessible” is the repair approach, where the web-designer simply brings the site to the requirements of WCAG or of the Section 508. While this makes the site more usable from the technical part, anyway it doesn’t help a lot. The Best Practices on the other way, focuses on creating a functionally easier environment, that improve the experience of all the users, not only the ones with disabilities. The site is mentoring the so-called “user-centered” design approach, that are inspired by the needs of people with disabilities, but also allow other users to get additional control when accessing the web resources.

The user-centered approach is centered around making assumptions not about what technologies should be used when accessing a web-resource, but more options can be implemented to use a larger range of technologies, so that the information could be restyled for the needs of the developer. In such a way, basing on the fact that all the users benefit from this design approach, developers can test to see if their resources are conforming to the user-centered design.