Universal Design for Web Applications: Web Applications That Reach Everyone

Universal Design for Web Applications teaches you how to build websites that are more accessible to people with disabilities and explains why doing so is good business. It takes more work up front, but the potential payoff is huge — especially when mobile users need to access your sites.

You'll discover how to use standards-based web technologies — such as XHTML, CSS, and Ajax, along with video and Flash — to develop applications for a wide range of users and a variety of devices, including the mobile Web. You'll also learn specifics about this target audience, especially the key over-50 age group, whose use of the Web is rapidly growing.

With this book, you will:

• Learn the importance of metadata and how it affects images, headings, and other design elements
• Build forms that accommodate cell phones, screen readers, word prediction, and more
• Create designs using color and text that are effective in a variety of situations
• Construct tables that present information without spatial cues
• Design Ajax-driven social networking applications that people with disabilities can access
• Provide audio with transcriptions and video that includes captions and audio descriptions
• Discover assistive technology support for Rich Internet Application technologies such as Flash, Flex, and Silverlight

Universal Design for Web Applications provides you with a roadmap to help you design easy-to-maintain web applications that benefit a larger audience.

Wendy Chisholm is a consultant, developer, author, and speaker on the topic of universal design. As co-editor of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) and then staff at the World Wide Web Consortium, she has worked with people around the globe to make the web accessible. Currently residing in Seattle, WA, Wendy consults with market leaders such as Microsoft, Adobe and Google, integrating universal design concepts into their tools and technologies. She continues to further the research and development of universal design as a part-time staff at the University of Washington.

Matt May is a developer, technologist, and accessibility advocate who is responsible for working internally and externally with Adobe product teams and customers to address accessibility in Adobe products, ensure interoperability with assistive technologies, and make customers aware of the many accessibility features that already exist in Adobe products. Prior to joining Adobe, Matt worked for W3C/WAI on many of the core standards in web accessibility, led the Web Standards Project's Accessibility Task Force, helped to architect one of the first online grocery sites, http://HomeGrocer.com, and co-founded Blue Flavor, a respected web and mobile design consultancy.