Note: For every book I read this year, I'm going to write a good old-fashioned book report about it. Since I don't have to worry about grades, it won't necessarily be anything long or detailed, but just a "I read this book" sort of thing.
I just finished Universal Design for Web Applications. I picked this book up specifically because I know absolutely nothing about how to design websites for people with disabilities. The book tries really hard to convince us that we all have "disabilities" and that we should stop thinking in terms of "us vs. them."
In fact, the second chapter of the book is where they start selling the idea of accessible websites (which I originally found annoying, because I was reading the book, indicating that I was already "sold"). I made sure to note down a few quotes from the book that really stuck out to me when trying to explain why accessible websites are important.
For instance, on the topic of convincing businesses to make accessible web sites, the authors wrote:
"What we usually encounter is hesitancy, if not hostility, to the idea of increasing a site's accessibility. Why should we fix the site for disabled users? We don't even have any disabled users!"
That got me thinking about my own attitudes towards accessibility. Often, I have this same attitude, or something similar, like "Well, the site's probably not visited often enough by people with disabilities, so I should balance cost of development with benefits the site would get."
The big thing I took away from this book is that we all have a preferences and tendencies that could be considered disabilities, and we often don't think of changing settings by clicking on that wheelchair sign. I am now committed to being more open to helping people out not because they are "disabled" but because it brings more configurability to the web.