Chapter 1. Introducing Universal Design
There’s a popular, and probably apocryphal, story that features a naval officer (sometimes it’s a businessman) who receives a performance review that reads: “This officer never makes the same mistake twice. However, he appears to be attempting to make them all once.”
Over the life span of the Web, we’ve learned a lot about what not to do. Sometimes, this trail of “don’ts” leads us in the direction of the “do.” But all too often, another “don’t” is lurking around the corner. Because of all of the complexities involved with heterogeneous servers and protocols and languages and authoring tools and browsers—and don’t get us started about the users—we as web tradespeople are all too happy to give up on finding the right way to build our content, once we’ve found some way to build it.
Before web production can grow into a profession, we first need a science, a calculus—or at least, some kind of broadly applicable line of reasoning on which we can rely to keep the don’ts at bay. In this book, we put all those pieces together, to help ensure that we don’t all keep making the same, or worst of all, self-perpetuating mistakes.
If our job is to create a science, we’ll need to determine the core value against which we measure all our progress. In the past, many have advocated adherence to a technical standard—say, HTML—and we agree that web standards are important. (You should expect as much from two alumni of the World Wide Web Consortium, which has published ...