The Web Standards Group held a meeting in London at the end of February on accessibility, and I promised to do a report so here it is.

First of all. let me say this was a meeting well worth attending for anyone involved in designing websites or in the position of commissioning websites. In fact, I’d go further and say it was well worth the 6 hour round trip from Lincoln.

The speakers were…

Mike Davies, presently works as a developer with Yahoo! Europe and was the lead developer involved in taking Legal & General’s website from an inaccessible site to an accessible one: Mike’s talk was all about how Legal & General did this.

Ann McMeekin, member of the RNIB web consultancy team, talked about what you shouldn’t do if you’re involved in creating an accessible website.

Finally, Niqui Merret, Flash developer, trainer and consultant talked about some of the basic accessibility features available in Flash.

Mike’s presentation covered what is now THE case study ( as quoted in PAS 78) for developing an accessible website.

He covered a whole range of issues which it would take far too long to explain in this post so to give you a flavour I’ll just list the important points:

• Project challenges
• Technical expertise
• Redesign requirements
• Selecting a web agency
• Redeveloping the site
• Resulting benefits
• Secrets of success

If you’d like a copy of Mike’s presentation email me and I’ll forward a PDF copy to you.

What I found very strange although perhaps not wholly unanticipated were the kind of questions the audience were asking during the Q&A at the end of Mike’s session; these were mainly focused on wanting to know what the penalties and chances of being sued for not having an accessible site. Given that Mike’s talk was focused on the business benefits of accessibility I found it difficult to understand why a bunch of supposedly intelligent developers and designers were apparently missing the point!

Mind you, I’ve long held the belief that business is just not being sold properly on the reasons for having an accessible website. Too much effort is expended on trying to beat the business with the ‘you could get sued for not having an accessible website’ approach. Of course it’s not impossible to get sued but it is extremely unlikely in the case of an SME. No, it’s the business benefits that should convince an organisation of the need.

Moving on, from a practical point of view so of more interest to devlopers Ann McMeekin gave an excellent talk on what not todo when designing an accessible website. Obvious points in the main, but ones that will trip up the less experienced designer. One example, not setting the default background colour in the body selector in the stylesheet. If a site uses grey text and the background colour isn’t set in the body selector then some browsers that have grey as the default background for the body will render the text unreadable as in grey on grey.

I’ve found these monthly meetings to be an excellent way of keeping abreast of latest developments in the web design world as the meetings always use speakers who are top of their field for any given subject. But what makes it even more useful is the subsequent debate from the floor, which also means the speaker is kept on his/her toes. The result usually produces new insights as the audience often raises questions for consideration that no one designer would necessarily think of.

And finally the debate ends up in a local pub afterwards, providing an excellent opportunity to network with other designer/developers. All in all a great night.