Let me get a few words out of the way about Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance—wow, wow, wow.

Friends of Ed is known for producing fantastic books for Web professionals, but this book, written by eleven of the industry’s leading heads on the topic of accessibility is a complete certification process in 648 pages.

No, you don’t really get a certificate or anything, but you will be up to speed on every important accessibiity issue and then some if you read this book, and you would be able to pass any Web site accessibility certification process if one existed (my impression). I would even venture to say that if there are accessibility classes being taught in college these days (and there ought to be), then this book should be an assigned text, and a bargain it would be too. Bruce Lawson must be applauded for his dedication to this series (the forerunner being Building Accessible Web Sites) and putting the people behind it together.

Walk with me. First, you have people like Jim Thatcher, Shawn Lawton Henry, and Cynthia D. Waddell (after whom the online accessibility tool, Cynthia Says, was named) giving you front-line information with professional clarity, and that’s just scratching the surface with respect to this book’s authoring team.

Think you know a lot about accessibility already? Forget it. Unless you’re Joe Clark (notably missing as a contributing author here) this book will school you right and left. Pop quiz, Neo, what are the 9 interdependent components of Web accessibility? (Clue: 6 are technical with one having 6 sub-components, and 3 are humanistic.) Don’t have that one on the top of your head? Guess what, that’s just one principle you learn in the first chapter, and there’s 17 chapters.

We haven’t even started. Legislation and the Web is already a tough channel to navigate and always changing with issues like pirating, copyright, personal information security, contract responsibilities and so forth being what they are and all; but now designers and business owners alike must be vigilant of accessibility policy too. Don’t play the fool, such policy is not just for your local government Web sites anymore; important accessibility legislation is being written around the globe and applies to everyone. Chapters 2, 16, and 17 of this book cover accessibility legalities in global scope and in great detail; even a couple of high-profile court cases are thrown in for persuasive demonstration.

Still with me? Good. Guidelines and the groups behind them (i.e., WAI, WCAG, and so forth) are expectedly here, but looked at with a critical eye. Also expected are topics on template structure, semantics, content, and evaluative tools and protocols—accessibility essentials. But check this, entire chapters are dedicated to today’s hot topics like Web forms and data entry, JavaScript, Flash, and Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). You’ll even get a look at how other W3C standards measure up, like SMIL and SVG. Happily the former is a great specification that can be used as a tool for enhancing accessibility support, but sadly it’s underutilized. The latter is a great specification, period, but sadly suffers from all the same maladies that once plagued Flash. Clearly there’s a lot of work to do yet.

We’re not done. Two very, very worthwhile chapters are added to make this book complete: one on implementing an accessibility program into the enterprise, and the other a real case study of retrofitting a big Web site to be more accessibility-compliant. Are you thinking ahead here? Once the accessibility message starts setting in on a wide scale—whether from education, ethical awareness, or legal fright—Web site accessibility retrofitting is going to provide significant opportunities for skilled designers who have earned their accessibility wings. Assuming you take Web design seriously, I recommend you get this book and start understanding accessibility at a deeper level, to get ahead of the game and do things right.

I like to conclude my reviews with an unbiased look at whatever aspects of a book I feel were weak, or perhaps problematic in some other respect. In all honesty, I don’t have a single negative thing to say here, though I would like to point out one thing to folks who have read other Friends of Ed books. Web Accessibility is more densely written than what you might expect; a reflection of the very experienced and educated authors behind it. Believe me, you won’t be blowing through this one in a few nights of bedtime reading. Expect to have this one at your study for a few weeks, and don’t let chapters go unseen. This book is worth every penny you pay for it.