Accessible Design for Users With Disabilities

Making the Web more accessible for users with various disabilities is to a great extent a matter of using HTML the way it was intended: to encode meaning rather than appearance. As long as a page is coded for meaning, it is possible for alternative browsers to present that meaning in ways that are optimized for the abilities of individual users and thus facilitate the use of the Web by disabled users. Before discussing the difficulties disabled users may have in accessing Web information, we should note that online information provides many benefits compared with printed information: it is easy for people with poor eyesight to increase the font size, and text-to-speech conversion for blind users works much better for online text than for print. Indeed, many disabled users are empowered by computers to perform tasks that would have been difficult for them with traditional technology. For an example, see aNew York Times article about one of their blind subscibers who now reads the newspaper by going to the Website in Lynx. You can even hear how the article sounds through a screen reader - note how reading is done at very high speed