"Usability, Accessibility and Markup Languages"

The current web doesn't deal with diversity very well; it is full of low-usability, inaccessible websites. Even if you have good eyesight it can be difficult, thanks to the large number of websites that render their texts with tiny fonts sized in pixels; but if you have poor eyesite, or are blind, it is truly a torture: vast numbers of current websites are designed for visual use only, on fixed screen sizes, on a single platform.

But this is bad, not just for us individually because we all need usabile sites, and will all one day need accessible sites, but because there are also solid economic reasons why a site should be usable and accessible. For instance, there's a blind billionaire user out there, with millions of friends who listen to his every word, who's going to make website builders realise that there is a very clear economic reason for making websites accessible for all...

This talk will discuss how markup langauges now being designed at W3C have been designed explicitely with usability, accessibility and device independence in mind and demonstrate how closely intertwined these three topics are.