Building Accessible Websites (With CD-ROM)

Using a strategic approach to the issues in a journalistic style, this book will be a foundation for how people think about this issue going forward-the first book people would read on the topic, before delving into the minutiae of the moment.

With lawsuits and human-rights complaints proliferating, and with simple awareness of accessibility percolating through the industry, soon it will be hard to find a web shop that won’t be producing accessible sites, whether it presently has the experience and know-how or not. Government mandates, lawsuits from disability groups, more non-English speaking web users, and an increasing population of Web-enabled devices make this a vital topic.

Customer Review: An Inaccessible Read
Written in 2002, this book is still considered the gold standard in web accessibility. I have no idea why. What Joe Clark has accomplished here is to spread about 20 pages of good accessibility information across a 400 page miasma. Most web designers don’t care about the history of captioning and transcription systems–we just want the facts, man. What should we do, and what should we avoid. Best practices. Etc. That info is in here, but you have to cut a swath through the verbosity to find much of it. Or just read the last page of each chapter, which summarizes the previous 40-odd pages in six or less sentences. Save yourself the price of the book and scan through the entire text of the book online. In the end, Building Accessible Websites is an inaccessible read.

Customer Review: Good content, poorly written.
First of all, I would like commend Mr. Clark for addressing this topic at all. Accessibility is an important in computer development.

While the content seems to be accurate, and quite detailed to the point that you could use the information in the book to actually build a site with it, the writing is so poor and very difficult to read. Mr. Clark needs to throw away his thesaurus and hire an editor. He would be better off delivering his message in a clear and concise manner, and spend less time writing in a very “fancy” way that would be better suited for thesis papers rather than a book targeted towards the masses. This heavy style of writing makes it a difficult book to digest while riding the subway.

Pretentious - the one word I would use to describe the overall style of writing. This really put me off as a reader, making the content even more difficult to absorb. (In one case, the author actually explains his choice of word, “indention” as opposed to the more commonly used “indentation”. His explanation seemed to imply that everyone who uses “indentation” is clearly *wrong*; two online dictionaries confirmed that “indentation” could have been used.) Of course, my opinion that the writing of this book is pretentious could also come from actually having met the author.

Read this book only if you really have the time to struggle through all his big words to get at the meaning behind them.