Let the Web work better for everyone

So why should your business benefit from adopting web standards? Well, the possible financial advantages can be achieved by numerous factors. I?d like to outline here the most prominent two.

First of all, having a web standards compliant business site will allow you to save a significant amount of financial resources on bandwidth costs. If you get rid of all elements that are not standards compliant, for example the fonts, tables, or these little images applied as design elements on your home page then the final size of the code can be reduced by as much as 50%. You might say that this isn?t much, but if you run a business website with a lot of traffic, for example a real estate or mortgage and loans website, this becomes a significant factor. By having a cached stylesheet that needs to be downloaded only once you will be able to save thousands of dollars every month.

There are also other benefits, besides hard cash in your pocket, of using CSS style sheets and conforming to proper web design techniques. Obviously, if you are an owner of a profitable website that offers loans or discusses investments and stocks issues you want to create a positive user experience. Making you code slimmer will contribute to a faster and more lively website which in turn will enable you to attract new customers. Sometime a slow page load time is all it takes to lose a client.

In order to build an accessible website, authoring tools must produce content that upholds web content
accessibility standards and support accessible authoring practices. This is especially important if the organisation will be using a Content
Management System (CMS) to produce content automatically.
These practices are not well-defined within the W3C. When we say
“support accessible authoring practices” there is little sense of what
that means.
What we lack here is the audience that should be addressed.
- The primary audience for this document is the software developer involved in creating authoring tools.
- The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines are also designed to be used by third parties to evaluate the
accessibility of existing tools.
Is this what the ATAG 2.0 spec is saying?

For those who are intrested in the subject matter of ATAG 2.0 here are the top10 Accessible Authoring Practices
that must be taken into account during the procurement of authoring tools and CMS.:
1. Provide Alternative Formats
* Alternatives for Text Presentations
* Alternatives for Other File Formats
* Alternatives for Images
* Alternatives for Programmed Objects
2. Provide Alternative Navigation
3. Provide a way to Bypass Repetitive Content
4. Present Text in a Linear Layout
5. Use Natural Language
6. Design for Device Independence
7. Provide Context Information
* Frame Context
* Table Context
* Lists, Layout, and Content Context
* Link Context
8. Explicitly Associate Labels with Form Elements and Group Related form Fields
9. Associate Table Headers with Table Cells
10. Describe the Access Strategies a Site Uses