Hurricane Web Publishing

I recently read Jeremy Keith’s blog posting regarding the lack of knowledge regarding accessibility in web design and development. Jeremy quotes some posts from a sitepoint forum and techcrunch regarding the Target lawsuit and it amazes me what people say about it.

I am no expert on web accessibility, but it’s not that hard to code and design sites that are more accessible for people with disabilities. I am a print designer who has switched over to doing web design a few years ago. In print design, I can say exactly what size this font should be and where this graphic should go exactly on a page. You can’t do that on the web and you have to take into account things such as different monitor sizes and user controlled font sizes. Building that flexibility into a site is one of the most difficult things in creating a site. But, it can be accomplished and I wonder if a lot of these designers/developers are trying too hard to make their designs pixel perfect. It could also be they are too lazy to make them this way or learn new techniques. There are still large web design and development firms designing sites using tables. So, getting people to change how they think when creating sites and using web standards is going to take a some time yet.