You can’t transmit a website directly into a person’s brain! That’s as silly a statement as I’ve ever heard; however, when you think about it, every web page must first pass through some type of hardware and software (e.g. a computer and a web browser) before you can access its content.
That being the case, the best chance you have of your web page being accessible to this ‘intermediate layer’ is to create your pages using standards based markup.
Visitors won’t be able to access your content if your pages don’t work on the particular browser they are using – be it a refreshable braille reader, WebTV, or the latest PC still running the buggy Internet Explorer 6. The secret to success is to ‘code to standards’.
If you code to standards (e.g. HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1, HTML 5) you have the best chance of your web page working on the ‘dumb’ machines that know nothing other than ‘how to follow the rules’ to render the structure of a page to an output device. If you also follow the rules, you are already well down the road towards an accessible website.
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Working with non-profits, charities, voluntary and public sector organisations and social enterprises for over 20 years. Jim set up one of the worlds first website accessibility web agencies in the mid 1990s.