Attractive accessibility

Recently two different people have expressed their aversion to Accessibility. The most pithy was "you accessibility nazis come in and take an attractive web site and make it ugly." I was astounded. Perhaps because I primarily retrofit existing websites for accessibility, I have always been oriented toward keeping the original look and feel untouched. Perhaps not pixel-perfect identical, but I strive for that.

One area that impacts the look and feel is testing for color contrast and testing for color deficiency. Perhaps I have been lucky, but I think I have been dealing with professional designers who know how to use color -- they may not be thinking about accessibility directly, but good design and accessible design are very closely linked -- just like good coding techniques and accessible coding are very close. A well coded site is easy to make accessible. Bad code is a nightmare, no matter what you are doing.

Check out CSS Zen Garden for examples of attractive, accessible design. It is a demo site with standardized HTML where different designers simply apply different style sheets for a radically different page.

For more information: http://www.csszengarden.com/