New accessibility articles from people we know and love. First up, from Digital Web Magazine a piece by Anitra Pavka entitled Accountability of Accessibility and Usability. The article covers the recent Southwest Airlines case which the judge ruled against. Anitra argues that even if the ruling suggested that the ADA doesn’t cover the web, we can’t slip with web standards - and that if we don’t follow the WAI/W3C standards, then someone else will come along and define a different set of standards. Not something that we want to happen! Anitra also takes a look at how the site actually fares in text browsers and finds out exactly where it went wrong (and isn’t it amazing that even after the case, they haven’t sorted out their act?!)
Also in Digital Web, an interview with Jakob Neilsen. Enough said about that.
In Evolt, a piece about alt attributes (aah, that old chestnut) with some interesting debate about how to use this much confused attribute.
Finally, there’s a piece in New Architect magazine entitled ‘Building a Barrier-free Web‘, in which author Susan Kuchinskas lays out the points for creating accessible sites, and also summarises some of the accessibility-checking tools currently available in HTML editors and WYSIWYG authoring packages.