Foltzwerk

As posted at The Web Standards Project. Target is being sued by the National Federation for the Bline for not making their site accessible. Accessibility is really quite easy and inexpensive if you simply commit up front to adhering to reasonable accessibility standards. The argument that it is too expensive just doesn’t fly anymore. Granted, if you built a large scale site with no intention of supporting accessibility a retrofit could cause a budget overrun. When you consider that SEO is an integral part of any marketing strategy and that search engines are essentialy “blind” users the resistance to accessibility simply doesn’t make any business sense.

“The US National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has brought legal action against Target corporation (a major US-based discount retailer which operates more than 1,300 stores in 47 states) because their web site is not accessible. The NFB has raised the issue with Target Corporation before…”

Last November Google began offering free web analytics. The service is free to use for sites with under five million visitors per month. Google’s web analytics offering is powered by the Urchin software they purchased earlier this year.

Demand for the free service has been so strong that Google has limited the number of new accounts. If you wish to participate you need to sign up and wait your turn.

While you’re waiting you can visit the complimentary Conversion University .

If you broadcast HTML email for a living then Mark Wyner’s excellent tutorial on Optimizing CSS Presentation in HTML Email is a must read.

Mark clearly demonstrates that CSS based HTML emails can be marked up in a semantic (Semantics, HTML, XHTML, and Structure) and accessible (Web Accessibility Initiative) fashion and degrade gracefully across all email environments.

Before reading this tutorial and examining the code and the output I believed that HTML e-mails required tables and liberal amounts of inline CSS. The next time I design an HTML template I will mend my ways.

Mark’s tutorial is actually part two in a series of which CSS and Email, Kissing in a Tree is part one.