Is designing for accessibility a burden or a benefit? "Universal Design for Web Applications" demonstrates how building a website to accommodate people with physical and learning disabilities makes marketing sense. It takes more work upfront, but the potential payoff is huge - especially when mobile users need to work with your sites. You'll learn how to use standards - based web technologies such as XHTML, CSS, and Ajax, along with new uses for video, Flash, and PDF to develop applications for a wide range of users and a variety of devices, including the mobile web. You'll also learn about the target audience - and why so many of them are in the key over-50 age group that accounts for 30% of web usage and growing. This book will help you: appreciate the importance of meta data, and how it affects images, headings, and other design elements; build forms that accommodate cell phones, screen readers, word prediction, and more; create visual designs using color and text that work for a variety of situations and people; build tables that present information without spatial cues; design Ajax-driven social networking applications that are easily accessible by the disabled; provide audio with transcriptions, and video that includes captions and audio descriptions; discover assistive technology support for Rich Internet Application technologies such as Flash, Flex, and Silverlight; and, learn the value of having an accessibility evangelist on your design team. Accessibility has spawned several innovations in recent years. "Universal Design for Web Applications" provides a road map for design so you can produce applications that function better, are easier to maintain, and benefit a wide range of people.