accessibility primer

good article by Matt May in Digital Web Magazine — Accessibility From The Ground Up: A Primer for the Web designer

good point:

The hardest part of Web accessibility, in my opinion, is the stuff outside the angle brackets.

some good reminders such as using the summary attribute to explain the purpose of tabular data in tables and the use of abbr and acronym.

on accessibility testing tools:

If you or your team is going about designing a site blithely unaware that accessibility problems are being created, automated tools are not going to save you in the end. They’ll just confirm what you probably already know—stuff is broken.

Designers need to study the needs of accessibility and design it into their processes from the beginning. It is sufficient for most purposes to read a book or two on Web accessibility to understand the audience you’re building for, what its needs are, and how to satisfy those needs.

Nearly all of the automated tools in the market also return “manual checks.” My experience, and that of the developers of these tools, is that authors often gloss over these checks, or don’t understand what is really required. A basic grounding in the meaning and intent of these manual checks will help you to build more accessible pages—and save a lot of time.