NSBA: Roundtable on accessible Web sites

I got to facilitate a roundtable discussion on accessible Web design today. The lack of an Internet connection in the room prevented us from showing some live sites, but I promised to post some links here. I showed a bit of my presentation on the topic from last year’s TIES conference. There are a number of useful links on that presentation—which was built using Eric Meyer’s S5 system—including some book recommendations. One that isn’t there is for Eric Meyer on CSS, an excellent project-based book on the subject. Designing With Web Standards by Zeldman is also excellent.

We ended up discussing content management systems a fair bit and their usefullness for building standards-compliant, manageable, and accessible sites. There are a number of education-specific content management systems exhibiting here in the vendor hall, and I recommended some other open source options including Plone, Drupal, and Joomla! (formerly Mambo). My previous post on the topic might be useful too. Readers interested in accessible Web design, and universal design more broadly, might be interested in my recent podcast with Earle Harrison which touched on many Web issues.

We also talked about the challenges associated with using parent or student volunteers as Web site builders and the time crunch that school Webmasters often feel. No magic bullets, unfortunately, but I think most walked away with something new to chew on.

If anyone from the session has any questions or feedback, feel free to post a comment.