Howdy y'all,

My Mom has developed macular degeneration and is faced with the possibility of loosing her eyesight. That's made me look at accessibility issues and web development. PC Week for April 10, 2000 had a great set of articles on accessibility and web page design. Some of the things that you can do to improve accessibility for the blind are really simple, like providing alternate text for each graphic on your page. You can evaluate the accessibility of your web page with a tool called Bobby at www.cast.org. It even makes suggestions on what you could change to make your page more accessible. (I tested www.whitehouse.gov this morning and it failed miserably.)

This problem might be worth looking at considering that commercial websites may be exposed to civil proceedings under the ADA if they don't. The National Federation of the Blind has recently filed suit under the Americans with Disabilities Act against AOL for not making their services more accessible. It's a test case and will probably be settled out of court but there will be more like it against smaller fish. If and when we ever get into putting databases on line, given the type of clients we work with, begin 'barrier free' would be a good selling point for us.

Some of the URLs mentioned in the articles are www.w3.org/WAI/, the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium, www.cast.org, the Center for Applied Special Technology, www.usdoj.gov/crt/ada/adahom1.htm, the DOJ, www.wgbh.org/ncam, the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media. There are good solid, practical suggestions on how to improve the accessibility of your web pages. There are several papers that I want to read at WAI with a little more care. I only skimmed them this morning.

Web stuff is going to be increasingly important for all VFP developers and I though I'd sound a 'heads up' so we're all aware of the issue.

Gregg