Chapter 14. Accessibility Basics

Accessibility has much in common with CSS layout and semantic XHTML. All are intended to ensure that our work will be usable and available to the largest possible number of readers, visitors, and customers. Accessibility is so closely linked to the other standards discussed in this book that in the 1990s, the W3C launched a Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) to advise web builders on strategies for achieving it (www.w3.org/WAI/GL).

WAI’s chief task is to create guidelines for making web content accessible to people with disabilities. Not surprisingly, these guidelines are called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines—or WCAG for short. WCAG 1.0 (www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10), published in 1999, offers 14 guidelines as general ...

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