<\/p>\n
It’s important for websites to be accessible<\/a> for people with disabilities. A lot of people just don’t “get it”, though. “Why bother making a website readable by the blind when there are so few of them, and they’re unlikely to visit my site anyway?” There are many responses to this question, but there’s one in particular that I think needs more attention. <\/p>\n Millions of people together build the Internet. Even an incorrigible techopessimist can’t deny that electronic networks permeate society, and that we’ve likely only seen the tip of the iceberg. We’re making a lot of important choices now, sometimes without much thought. <\/p>\n It’s a lot easier to get things right the first time, rather than try to retrofit a solution<\/a> later after you’ve screwed up. If we make the web accessible today, as we’re building it essentially from scratch, we won’t incur prohibitive costs in the future fixing all the mistakes we made. Although the Americans with Disabilities Act doesn’t yet apply to websites, there’s a good chance that it someday will<\/a>. Or at least that it ought to. <\/p>\n So let’s build things right<\/b> from the start. The Internet was originally a text-based medium which opened up fantastic new possibilities for people with disabilities. These possibilities are being foreclosed by short-sighted “computer people” who are creating websites and services that ignore smaller audiences. <\/p>\n Besides, accessible websites<\/a> tend to be better organized and have superior interfaces for the non-disabled as well. They tell you that the designer took care. They are also easier for search engines<\/a> to index and comprehend, creating a richer informational resource for all of us. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s important for websites to be accessible for people with disabilities. A lot of people just don’t “get it”, though. “Why bother making a website readable by the blind when there are so few of them, and they’re unlikely to visit my site anyway?” There are many responses to this question, but there’s one in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adam.rosi-kessel.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}