le_gber - 11:04 pm on Jun 26, 2007 (gmt 0)

Just curious, but how many designers actually view their designs with the CSS, scripts, and whatever, turned off?

To be honest most don't - they wouldn't know how to toggle these things on/off :) (for those of you who want to, check out firefox 'web developer toolbar' or ie 'ais web accessibility toolbar'.

What are your views on the topic?

Design and accessibility can be served together and create a beautiful - and usable - sites. There are way of making flash and javascript / ajax more accessible but people usually don't do it because of lack of time or knowledge.

Why are there so many non-accessibile sites still being produced?

As above, lack of time and/or knowledge and also:
1. small business users want to have more and more control over their content and ask to have CMS's added to their site - most of which still create invalid/deprecated code;
2. because frontpage is loaded with windows and people think that this makes them web designers;
3. because people are lazy. It take some thoughts to make a complex site accessible and even some 'professional' web desingers still choose the 'cheap' route when it comes to coding. A lot still do it even for simple sites.

When I see the 30Kb html page I just received from a 'professional' web designer (many years experience), with 6 levels of embedded tables, no doctype and the site not displaying properly in FFox, I can't help but cringe. When I'm done with the page, it'll be 3 or 4Kb as these's almost no text on it, but plenty of td and inline style!

What's the current legal position (UK in particular)?

Some people would like to have you beleive that it's a legal requirement to have an accessible website, but it only is for governental bodies. And when you see what the DTI has been up to [google.co.uk], you stop wondering why accessibility is not mainstream yet.

One particularly important topic for me is the submit button. Designers love to make it pretty... and in one current case, the designer isn't happy about using a background image with CSS formatted text on top... he wants it to be just the background image with no text. My concern is that it makes the text inaccessible to screenreaders - but where do you draw the line? How much effort is enough?

Button design - this should give your designer some ideas: -http://www.digital-web.com/articles/push_my_button/ you can do anything with button and CSS