Maximum Accessibility

After reading Maximum Accessibility, Making Your Web Site More Usable for Everyone by John Slatin and Sharron Rush, I immediately feel a need to redesign/recode this site to be usable by people with disabilities. John Slatin shows readers how it feels to browse the web with a screen reader (JAWS) and the experience is extremely frustrating. If you think waiting for a Flash intro to load is bad, browsing with JAWS is even worse if the sites do not designed for accessibility. Even buying a book from Amazon is a horrible experience. One of the projects John pointed out; the Hirshhorn museum (designed by Second Story) is beautifully designed with a page on accessibility, which describes all the disability accommodations at the museum but the website itself is inaccessible.

Maximum Accessibility is effective in a way that after reading it, readers will always remember to consider people with disabilities on their next web project. I highly recommend this book for the theories presented but the tips and techniques are not too strong. If you are looking for a straight technical book on accessibility, you might want Joe Clark’s Building Accessibility Websites. With the combination of both books, you will be able to learn and understand both theory and technical which is invaluable.