Creating accessible websites is essential. If you are building websites for government-funded organizations, then you may be obliged by law to create websites usable by people with a range of disabilities. If you're building sites for a business or any other kind of organization, building accessible sites will ensure that no part of your audience is excluded from reading your content.
Joomla! provides all the facilities you need to make a web site accessible to users with a variety of disabilities. Not only can it produce accessible web sites, but with a few tweaks users of assistive technologies can work with the administration system to add, edit, and manage content.
This book looks at what accessibility is and the various reasons, such as legislative or legal, as to why you really need to understand accessibility and then create websites that can be used by everyone.
Joshue O Connor
Joshue O Connor is Senior Accessibility Consultant with CFIT (Centre For Inclusive Technology).
CFIT is a part of the NCBI (National Council For The Blind of Ireland) and is a not-for-profit organization that provides expert advice and services to public and private sector organizations. These services include user testing, accessibility auditing and consultancy.
Joshue has a creative background in Graphic Design, which lead to Web Development and New Media Training. After several years in the shark infested waters of the private sector, through IT training, he got to work teaching people with a wide range of physical and cognitive disabilities.
This was an invaluable hands-on experience that brought him into contact with a diverse range of Assistive Technology users, who found technology a positive and enabling force in their lives. A natural gravitation towards Web Accessibility thus blossomed.
Joshue is skilled in the design and development of accessible websites and has a deep understanding of the diversity of user requirements. He is a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS), the Web Standards Project ILG (WaSP ILG), the Irish Design For All E-Accessibility Network (Irl-Dean), the IIA User Experience Working Group (UEWG), EUAIN, and the HTML 5 Working Group. This is his first book, contributions to obscure academic papers notwithstanding.
In his spare time he hangs out with his plants, studies computer science, plays Irish traditional music badly, and runs a small record label TechRecord.