The CSS Anthology, Second Edition

Chapter

8

Accessibility and Alternative Devices

CSS allows us to separate the structure and content of our documents from the

presentation of the site. This means that visitors using devices that can’t render the

site’s design—either because they’re limited from a technical standpoint, such as

some PDA or phone browsers, or as a result of their own functional advantages,

such as screen readers that speak a page’s text for the benefit of visually impaired

users—will still be able to access the content. However, we’re still free to create

beautiful designs for the majority of users who do have browsers that support CSS.

While separating content and structure from presentation, and considering how

best to structure the underlying document, will mean that users of screen readers

and browsers that don’t support CSS can easily understand your site, you still need

to be aware of other users who, though they can see the design of the site, have

particular accessibility-related needs. Simply using CSS for layout purposes does

not make your site accessible to everyone. For example, many people who suffer

some kind of vision loss can read text that’s clearly laid out and can be enlarged.

This chapter also covers the use of alternative style sheets (also called alternate

style sheets), style sheets for different media (such as print style sheets), and browser-

based style sheet switching with the aid of JavaScript.