This is the other reason I haven’t posted much recently.

One of my biggest frustrations when I talk to other developers about accessibility is the inevitable question “What book should I look at?” I’ve never had a response that I’m completely comfortable giving, so I’ve been writing one. The Accessible Web: Creating Content for Everyone is a different type of accessibility book, written for real web developers with real projects.

In this book, we’re not going to spend all of our time looking at reams of guidelines that are written for accessibility experts instead of for developers. Instead, I’ll introduce some basic principles for accessible development and we’ll look at how you can put them into action. Because a lot of people out there talk in terms of the guidelines, we’ll look at them enough to be comfortable using them for testing and talking about them when they come up.

I’m also not going to tell you that you’re an evil person if you like pages that aren’t black and white with blue links. This page should be proof of that. I’m not about making the world worse for the non-disabled—I want the best possible results for all of our users and we’re going to look at how we can provide images, video, Flash and PDF in an accessible way that still looks good to our sighted users.

The book isn’t finished yet, and won’t be on the shelves until late fall of this year, but starting today, Pragmatic Bookshelf is making the current version of the book available as a beta book. This means that you can get the parts of the book that are already finished and we’ll send you updates as soon as they’re written and edited. This also gives me the opportunity to let you ask questions before we go into print and make sure that the book is everything you want to know about building accessible web pages—and you can tell me if I’ve made any mistakes ;)

And thanks to Kate for the fantastic cover design!