Website Accessibility: Resources

• Web Accessibility Initiative
  The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) coordinates with organizations around the world to pursue accessibility of the Web through technology, guidelines, tools, education and outreach, and research and development. This is an important site for anyone interested in accessibility issues. The site provides numerous links to guidelines, checklists, techniques, training resources, evaluation and repair tools, and more.
  
• Tools and Resources for Accessible Web Design, compiled by John Slatin and Jim Allan
  In conjunction with the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, John Slatin and Jim Allan, nationally recognized leaders in the field of Web accessibility, have put together a list of useful tools and resources for making websites accessible. John Slatin also cooperated with Sharron Rush in Maximum Accessibility: Making Your Web Site More Usable for Everyone (Addison-Wesley, 2003). The book provides a thorough discussion of accessibility issues and guidelines, and step-by-step guidance for the design of accessible sites.
  
• The Online Teaching and Learning Newsletter July 26, 2000
  This is a special edition of Murray Goldberg's Weekly Newsletter of Online Teaching and Learning, published on the 10th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Several of the sites listed were compiled by Seana Matthes of the University of British Columbia.
  
• Evaluation Websites for Educational Uses: Bibliography and Checklists
  Information specialists at the ITS Center for Instructional Technology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill provide a list of articles on evaluating educational websites as potential educational resources. They also list questions one should ask when reviewing such sites. Combined with close attention to accessibility issues, the tips on designing educational sites are likely to give web designers a solid grasp on the special issues involved in creating online resources for educational purposes.
  
• Accessibility: the Politics of Design
  A List Apart is a newsletter designed primarily for website designers. This particular issue contains Alan Herrell's article Accessibility: the Politics of Design, which includes sections entitled Uncle Sam Needs YOU and The Developers' Dilemma. This article is a follow-up to the one Herrell wrote a year earlier on the impact of Section 508 of The Workforce Investment Act of 1998.
  
• The University of Florida created a useful web site with concise guidelines for designing accessible web pages.
• The University of Texas at Austin Accessibility Guidelines

• Web Page Accessibility @ Georgia Southern University provides a clear guide for identifying changes in natural language in the HTML code. This basic piece of information is a must for any person designing a web page in a language other than English, or a web page that is written in more than one language (for example, a dictionary page including words in both English and French).
• The ISO 639 code for languages can be found here. It provides the standard two-character tags for language codes (for example, "F R" for French, "D E" for German, "R U" for Russian, and so on). "ISO" stands for the International Organization for Standardization, a network of national standards institutes from 147 countries.