About Web Accessibility Features

While trying to create the most pleasing layout it happens that many people forget about Web Accessibility - to get the most information about this topic you should read the introduction of the W3C WAI = the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium. The w3.org/WAI page starts off by saying

 "The power of the Web is in its universality.
  Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."
-- Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web

There is a lot about web accessibility that can be done by the author of the web content, including to provide alt="" and title="" texts everywhere. For the mksite.sh project we care much to help with the navigation of the webpage. For users of graphical browsers it is best to have a navigation using pale background colors that can guide the eye. Small monochrome browsers are still widespread among mobile devices. And the biggest challenge is about blind people that can only read web content one line at a time with the help of a braille terminal. And while blind people might seem low in number to the common people then you should still be very aware of the "visually impaired" group ranging between 10%-20% of the population (your grandma might be one of those) and let's not forget about those 9% of healthy male people being color-blind towards red or green.

With mksite.sh we ask you to write a "sitefile" that  (a) contains html markup complex enough to build colored visual structure for desktop graphical screens [the biggest audience]  (b) and put the references to associated pages into known places with known markups that we can parse an "access-tree" of sect/subsect pages. From the sect/subsect relations we can automatically generate alternative navigations to help accessibility to the content of your website. The two most prominent features are:

• sitemap: list all pages with a long description in an overview page. They clearly show the sect/subsect relation as well as next/previous page. The descriptions are assembled from the title lines of each associated page which are generally longer than the shorthands of a navigation bar in the sitefile. In earlier projects I did also parse an "info" line from the associated pages, i.e. a subtitle/shortsummary. This has not yet been integrated into mksite.sh
• printer-friendly: the name of this feature is more targetted towards those unaware of `web accessibility`. It does not only cut away unneeded layout markup of the sitefile (including the css based coloring) but it also adds a simplified navigation at the top - but which still has all the sect/subsect relation. This navigation is also useful for PDA screens and other graphical mobile devices with small monochrome screen size and only a four-way key to move around over the hotlinks on a screen.

Next we continue with:

• Checking out the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
• Recommending about Usual Sect/Subsect Guidelines