To DDA or not to DDA?
Preface
I'm about to embark on a personal project for us biking community. The idea is to create a website where visitors can log the routes they have taken and leave pictures, link to flickr etc....
The main interface for this will be Google Maps. Now, because Google Maps is inherently not DDA compliant nor does it degrade gracefully, does this give me Carte Blanche to develop the best "Web 2.0" interface I can muster or do I still need to have some sort of offering for the web community to whom the DDA applies to.
I suppose this comes down to audience. In the past, the target audience has always been decided on for me so the decision to comply or ignore DDA has always been made for me. Since mine will be built up mostly of bikers, I don't think there will be a huge concern to address the needs of the disabled. Or am I being short sighted. Might casual visitors to the site find interest in the stories?
My Options
- Non DDA - Ignore the DDA community and make this site strictly non DDA compliant
- Part DDA - Structure some of the site that does not use Google Maps to be DDA Compliant
- Total DDA - Include a way to use the site with using Google Maps
My Current Thinking
although this is subject to change
So, I need to decide on a route to take a stick to it. To be honest I'll probably ignore the DDA, but I'd appreciate some feedback on what the general opinion is on DDA and how you guys n' gals approach the subject.
Accessibility Overload...
Working with some accessibility ‘bods’ here I have found the only way to make a site both accessible and functional is to almost write two versions of a website.
Accessibility is definatly something that should be considered, but shouldn’t it be something that can be decided by web authors? As developers we usually have a lot to offer in the way of rich, data driven interfaces but accessibility and the noscript tag constantly shackle us.
I know of one product that reads the screen to blind folk. If you arrange your divs in the wrong order or miss alt tags this can make their experience very difficult. So arrange your divs in a correct order and add alt text – it won’t affect anything but the amount of time it takes to build the site. But when accessibility standards say that all your detrimental functionality must work with JavaScript switched off things become much more frustrating.
I say if you are building a personal site and wish to have some funky functionality then leave the extremes of accessibility but do include the easy bits & pieces.
Also this might be worth a look, perhaps in the future we may have the courts to deal with:
Chris Gaskell, .NET & Web development Enthusiast