Summary

In this chapter, you have seen some of the issues that you should consider when building Web pages and Web applications so that they are accessible to the widest possible audience. You may consider some of these issues to be optional; for example, supporting multiple languages or targeting mobile devices. However, other issues are more important. Making sure your sites are accessible to disabled users is a mandatory requirement in many casesespecially for corporate or government sites that risk legal action if not properly accessible.

This chapter looked at a range of issues that fall under the general heading of "accessibility," both from the technical aspect of browser support and the physical standpoint of the user's capabilities. The first part of the chapter discussed the technical issues of detecting the capabilities of the browser and providing suitable content or information on the requirements to use the site. This included support for features such as client-side scripting and cookies. It also looked at how you can make your pages easier to use by taking advantage of alternate content, short-cut keys, tab order, and general design principles.

The final three sections of the chapter discussed specialist user agent requirements for your sites, breaking this down into categories. The first was how you can provide better support for disabled users, including techniques such as alternate content, provision of extra information within the pages for specialist user agents, and designing the site as a whole to make it easier to use. These are, of course, just extensions of the general techniques discussed in the first parts of the chapter.

The second of the three sections on accessibility showed how you can use a special set of controls that are part of ASP.NET to enable your pages to work correctly on the small-screen and mobile devices that are becoming ever more popular. These often require a special type of markup language as well as consideration of the overall page size, complexity, and navigation strategy you use.

Finally, the last section of the chapter looked briefly at the way you can build sites that support localization (sometimes confusingly referred to as globalization), by allowing users to choose the language for the site or by building your site with conversion to a different language as an installation option. As you saw, this involves more than just changing the text content of the pages.

Overall, you should now have a good grasp of the issues involved in building accessible Web sites and Web applications and be prepared to implement these features as you design and build your sites.