The role of the web designer is partially situated around user-centered design. As a designer we need to provide functionality that makes a good user experience.

Sarah Horton, author of the book Access By Design - A guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers (2005) perhaps deliberately mixes up accessibility and usability here.

Official book site: universalusability.com

This book is a primer - a simple and concise introduction to the fundamentals and basic principles about designing accessible and usable websites. S. Horton says:

Do not take control of aspects of the user interface […] that belong in the domain of the user.

The fundamentals are design simple, design for keyboard access and design for transformation. The book is written from a practical point of view full of website screenshots to illustrate best practices and guidelines. In each chapter (document structure, text, images, forms,tables, lists, color, data tables,…) you get a philosophical and meaningful explanation on how to design with usability and accessibility in mind. The last chapters deal with audio and video, page lay-out,interactivity and editorial style. The key message: the Web is a universal medium where appropriate design decisions benefit both visual and non-visual users.

Improving readability using structural markup providing alternate textual content (e.g. for video, audio) or text-to-speech alternate content coding accessible websites that can be read by screen reader softwaredesign fluid lay-out to cater for small and wide screens. Orientation cues for easy to find your way in a website.

In a recent interview in Digital Magazine (Sept. ‘05), the author says:

I think of “access by design” as sort of a philosophical approach to Web design, so it’s just deciding that theprimary goal for your design decision-making is going to be to provide access. And the universal usability part is a kind of practical application of that methodology and philosophy that the decisions you make are always going to be the ones that most favor universal usability of your Web sites.

These are all perfect examples of forward and simple design principles in favor of the end-user.

What you wont find in the book are technical in-depth solutions.There are some redundant chapters on putting efforts on making table-based websites or frame-based websites more accessible or usable for that matter. For the entire book, the emphasis is on using structural markup and CSS anyway. Added the lack of coding examples makes it hard to put the ideas presented in practice.

What I do like about the book: the many real-world examples that illustrate good design and concise and forward explanations on how to design usable and accessible websites. The book is aimed to get you warmed up, and get you thinking. But nothing more than that. Like theillustration of the front cover, it opens the door but leaves a lot of questions to be answered.

The entire book is on-line in a HTML format. As Sarah Horton says:

The answer is simple: I write books so people will read them, and having the book online means more people can access the content.

Whether you're new to web accessibility or not, this book by Jim Thatcher, Michael R. Burks, Christian Heilmann, Shawn Lawton Henry, Andrew Kirkpatrick, Patrick H. Lauke, Bruce Lawson, Bob Regan, Richard Rutter, Mark Urban, and Cynthia D. Waddell -- with a forward by Molly Holzschlag - will have something for you. It covers in detail some of the finer points so that your next web site will be better then your last and that it'll be in compliance. The book's topics (sections) include the following:

The Impact of Web Accessibility: Basic understanding and concepts, the law, and enterprise implementation.

Implementing Accessible Web Sites: Technologies overview, assistive technologies, content accessibility, accessible navigation, data input, CSS, accessible JavaScript, Flash, and PDFs, testing, intro to WCAG 2.0, and a case study (university web site redesign).

Accessibility Law and Policy: US laws, worldwide laws, various appendixes.

The information in this book is available on the web, but it's variable and fragmented. This tome puts it all together in a single resource and does so with the voice of authority. Thus, if web accessibility is your cup of tea, your bread and butter, or just something you want to understand better, this book is a must-read. I'm giving it five stars as I think it's the best in its class.