Brian Abeling  
Pekin District 108  
Pekin, Illinois 

Designing Access to WWW Pages 
Sponsored by the Alliance for Technology Access, this article provides a brief overview of strategies that web developers can use make their web sites more accessible to those with disabilities.  Tips included the following: 

• Avoid using tiled backgrounds since the can make the text hard to read
• Use the ALT tags with images so that text-based readers will at least be able to read the description of the pictures.
• Use a letter "D" next to images that are linked to a text description of images.

In relationship to the web development training that I do for teachers, I  will encourage our web developers to use either of the following two methods... 
1) Find out who you audience is and then develop the site specifically for them.  For examle, if you audience will include those with visual disabilities, then you design your site specifically for them. 
2) If you are not sure exactly who your audience is, then you should design multiple pages that will accomodate the various needs of different groups.  

Short Sited 
Written by Jeri Clausing for Yahoo! Internet Life magazine, this article gives the user a  feel for how those with disabilities struggle through the Web.  Included are a few interviews with several disabled persons who tell the story of how they try to use the Web and frustrations they encounter.  For me, this article made a much bigger impact that any of the others.  It's too easy to just tell someone that you shouldn't use tables or don't use image maps.  Having read the stories of these individuals it's become much clearer to me how web design impacts their accessibility.  

The article also explains some of the organizations (W3C, NFD, NCAM, Trace Center) that are actively working on establishing accessibility guidelines for web developers.  In fact, the new HTML 4.0 standards will include specific guidelines that will enable screen readers to translate web pages.  

In using this material for teaching teachers about web development, I would most likely use the section dedicated to the stories of the disabled and their experiences on th Web.  I think that teachers and students would response better to these types of stories rather than just telling them what to do and what not to do.  Perhaps it would be even better if we could set up several computer stations with the actual screen reading software so that teachers/students could experience it first hand.  

P.S. - I really like this article, but when I ran the page through Bobby - its scored a dissappointing 1 star.