That little mouthful is the full title of the latest book with my name on it. Published by Friends of Ed, it’s now gone to the printers and will be available sometime in July. I was extremely proud to be asked to contribute, as there are some real shining lights in the world of accessibility involved; how’s this for an awesome line up: Andrew Kirkpatrick, Christian Heilmann, Jim Thatcher, Cynthia Waddell, Michael R. Burks, Shawn Lawton Henry, Bruce Lawson, Mark Urban, Patrick H. Lauke and Gez Lemon (tech editing).
As the subtitle implies, the book focusses on a web standards approach to accessibility, with chapters on HTML, Javascript and my chapter on CSS. But this is a practical book, and the web does not work on standards alone, so there are also excellent chapters on making Flash and PDF accessible, as well as details about assistive technologies. The issue of web accessibility in law and regulations is also of importance to many people. In my opinion this book covers these issues to the deepest, most pragmatic level I’ve yet seen. There was even time to squeeze in an appendix on PAS 78.
Writing a chapter on ‘CSS for Accessible Web Pages’ was an interesting exercise in itself as it meant taking CSS in isolation. Some aspects are obvious – user style sheets for example. Others are less obvious such as discussion of highlighting areas of the page which have focus. I included a fairly deep discussion of image replacement techniques as these can be really problematic from an accessibility perspective. I also highlighted as many best practices as I could (for example including text colors with background colors) including a special section on zoom layouts.
As you can tell I’m somewhat pleased with Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance and I’m really looking forward to seeing the final book. I know it will make a really useful addition to our shelves at Clearleft.
Comments
1
Nicely done!
I am pre-ordering this one!
Also, i put the links for the US and UK for amazon here on your flickr:
http://flickr.com/photos/clagnut/176259676/
Good work!
2
Time to prebook here too then. Looks just what I could be doing with as a bit of extra summer reading.
3
Big congrats Rich (and company). A must-read if ever there was one.
Was it written in the Eden Project?
4
Cool man, I’m looking forward to reading and reviewing it. Sounds like it will be a very solid reference book.
5
Colly – yep that’s the Eden project. Why? Because this book started off as the second edition to Constructing Accessible Websites but now has a different publisher, many different authors and is completely re-written – a lot’s happened in 4 years of web development, especially when it comes to accessibility.
6
Sounds a very interesting book – looks like there is a separate chapter for each contributor? Harnessing all that experience into one book must have been a difficult thing for the editors!
7
It is the Eden Project, and I chose it back in 2001 as tghe first edition of the book was going to be the launch book for our new imprint “glasshaus”, and I liked the visual pun on a great glass greenhouse.
It didn’t end up being the launch book, though, as some of the authors delivered late. Which also explains why this edition slipped from a May in-time-for-@media publication to late July).
Richard is being way too modest about his chapter; it rocks.
8
Congratulations Rich and everyone else involved, I pre-ordered this a while back and look forward to breaking into the top 1000 Amazon reviewers with a 5-star review next month!
9
Sounds like a must have, especially because of the various writers. I am curious to see how that works out but I’ll order one as soon as it becomes available over here.
10
And what is size of your book? If you include really all what you have said, then it must be huge
11
I believe the book is about 500 pages, so yes it’s pretty big.
12
Some interesting info about autors
http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=1590596382
13
Ah i finally is coming. It is funny, as this one was originally meant to be shipped on my birthday (26/04) and I was writing my full book Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax (another short title) at the same time.
Now it seems that my book will come out before this one – which is fun as I think I plugged the other one in my Chapter on “Accessible JavaScript” ;-)
Anyways, this was quite an effort and Gez Lemon as a Tech Editor is a real treat to work with.
14
Chris – looking forward to your book – I know it’s gonna be good. And I’d like to publicly second your sentiments about working with Gez as tech reviewer – he was great.
15
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