Dave Shea is impressed at the standards-based design evident in a number of student portfolios, and I’ll agree with him to a point: a lot of them look very nice. However, he fails to note that many are completely inaccessible to non-graphical users; some, in fact, can’t even be used by those with recent traditional browsers. To wit:
Invisible
[Document has only hidden links. Use the 'l'ist command.]
In a non-CSS browser:
Linkless wonder
Headless Wonder
The what now?
These were team based projects which took lots of planning and co-operation by all team members. Both these projects are 100% standards compliant, built using XHTML, css, and flash. - (To view one of the projects click on the above pictures.)
As their teacher says, the results speak for themselves!
It might be worth taking a page from Jeffrey Veen’s book for his next course: when Web design is practiced as a craft, and not a consolation, accessibility comes for free.
