Who's responsibility is web accessibility anyway?

Having completed my experiment in web layout, the experience prompted me to wonder why it is that the legal and practical responsibility for web accessibility is placed on individual developers rather than the web browser developers who are actually responsible for a lot of the differences in the way code is rendered from one to the other?

From a policy perspective it seems to me that browser developers and also assistive technology developers must need to work together to establish cross-compatibility in how code is rendered and yet it is not these parties who are held responsible when people with disabilities find access to content difficult, but the individual developer who has to try to compensate for what I assume are deliberate choices on the part of browser developers to market applications not to meet W3 standards.


It seems to me that blaming the individual developer and web site publisher for the level of web content accessibility (which very much depends on how many hacks and browser specific prefixes are employed by the coders) is putting the responsibility onto the wrong party in terms of creating good policy outcomes regarding accessibility. What do you think?

My first attempt at Responsive Design

It's been an interesting fortnight working on my little layout project. My main frustration throughout was that every time I changed the layout code I then had to change the page content, given that the page content contained these code snippets.

I started out the project quite skeptical that fixed designs were as bad for layout as mooted (even though I had always used fluid designs) so it was an interesting exercise to prove myself wrong. I am just happy to have a firm basis for my design decisions.

I did attempt to combine media type targtting with using a html5 layout tag but found the browser support for the rules applied to the multi-column tag that I used were not properly supported and so I ended up using XHTML strict for all pages and leaving html5 tags for a future project.

It is a natural progression from the conclusions of my layout experiment to learn responsive design so I have been boning up using the Kindle versions of Responsive Web Design with HTML5 & CSS3 by Ben Frain and The Book of CSS3: A Developers Guide to the Future of Web Design.

I have applied several break point styles to the index page.

I have also installed and now use Git and also PHP5, nginx & mySQL (on Ubuntu 11.10). It has been a busy time but so far I'm happy with the rate I'm picking things up. Given I've done very little code in the past few years, my commitment seems to be paying off.