Accessibility is more than just alt-text

I found this great article today on writing accessible Web pages: Understanding Disabilities when Designing a Website. It's great because the first thing it does is explain exactly why you want to be accessible - statistics. For instance, from their sources, if you make a site inaccessible to visually impaired people you are ignoring potentially 12 million people in the United States and the United Kingdom. And there are lots of other English-speaking countries out there that you're ignoring their visually impaired people as well. Personally, if I could get 1% of those people to come to my site every day, I would be ecstatic. If I could get 0.1% of those people to come to my site every day, I'd be really happy. I don't want to turn away customers.

The second reason the article is great is because it gives concrete examples of how you can make your site accessible. Not just telling you "use alt text", but pointing out that form instructions (like which fields are required) that come after the form field are nearly impossible for a screen reader to process. Or that providing a sitemap of your site gives people with cognitive disabilities a great sense of how large the site is and how much information there is to process. (Before you ask, my sitemap is here. It's big, you might be surprised how big.) And there are tons of other suggestions.