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Accessibility is a key part of the design of any modern website. The phrase itself is somewhat vague however, as it covers quite a few areas.

Firstly is the readability of the page in browsers such as screen-readers or Braille screens - pieces of software that translate the page into audio or touch formats to be read by blind or partially sighted people. The main way of achieving compatibility with these readers is to keep the layout as simple as possible, and to limit unnecessary graphical complications (such as large amounts of Flash). You should also ensure that your images all have ALT tags attached to them - preferably with a proper description rather than merely "A Picture" or something similar. A text-only mode is not compulsory, but can be quite useful if for some reason you need to use a lot of graphical wizardry. It is also worth using relative rather than fixed font sizes as this allows the font size to be determined by the client rather than by the web page - a lot of people who can still see but have trouble with small text just set their system's font size to be larger than normal, and get frustrated with constantly having to resize web pages to be able to read them.

The second issue is the readability of the page on mobile browsers. This can be quite tricky to determine as all mobile devices have different screen sizes and different ways of handling the output of a web-page. It is good practice to try and resize images server-side rather than client side as mobile devices often have limited bandwidth, or the bandwidth is expensive. If your site receives a large volume of mobile traffic, it is worth coding a separate layout (both in CSS and in common page functions, such as menus) to handle mobile browsers. The World Wide Web Consortium has recently begun a Mobile Web Initiative (http://www.w3.org/Mobile/) in an attempt to provide a degree of standardisation both to browsers and to web-pages.

The third issue of web accessibility is that of the ease of use of a site for the majority of users - i.e. those viewing the site in browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Konqueror, Safari or Opera at a reasonable desktop resolution (1024x768 is more or less a minimum resolution for most computers, 1280x1024 and upwards is common on desktops). It is worth trying to avoid absolute widths and heights for components wherever possible - percentage widths tend to scale better without sacrificing the layout of the page. Also, it is worth noting that each browser

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