MelbourneNorg

CSS Naked Day

To promote accessibility on the web and raise awareness about quality coding and design including the use of semantic mark-up, adherence to the WCAG guidelines and good web design practice in general  for 24 hours on 9 April 2008 hundreds of websites will be stripped of their Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as part of the 3rd CSS Naked Day.

We hope to bring across from the "dark side" of the web industry those who still design for specific resolutions, specific browsers, employing all sorts of dodgy hacks and embedding text in images and such ... general bad practice, making sites inaccessible to people using reading/navigation assistance software and devices, people using mobile devices and so on.

We've made great progress over the years but there's still a way to go yet and there are still people designing sites who have never heard of semantic coding and believe accessibility is simply about vision impaired people. Some even believe that people with disabilities are a minority group that they don't have to worry about.

Not true. Yes there are legal reasons why you have to care (discrimination) - but it is not the reason you should be caring about making your information available easily to everyone ... and you do care about your users, right?

My website www.purecaffeine.com will be participating in the day - in fact I've started 40 minutes early as I didn't get organised to set up an automated WordPress plugin so I've had to do it manually.