I’m a strong proponent of web accessibility standards and happened to stumble across the Guild of Accessible Web Designers during my travels around the wibbly web.

Their mission statement is “Promoting a vision of the future that assumes accessible web design to be, relevant, obtainable, and not at odds with successful business practice or good visual and usable design.”

A noble aim but their website isn’t exactly inspiring design wise. As they are trying to dispel the false belief that an accessible website can’t be pleasing to the eye you might have thought they’d spend a little more time on their website design? There are even formatting issues in Internet Explorer 7.

It does however look like members know their stuff and I’m pleased to see membership is selective - you must prove your accessibility expertise before joining.

For most this screen resolution has been gone for some time however from a web development perspective a lot of websites still ensure that 800 x 600 screens have no horizontal scrolling. This was originally because it was thought a large enough percentage of visitors were still using this resolution however the fact that some high profile (and benchmark) website are still optimised for 800 x 600 and above certainly hasn’t helped to see this limiting factor being removed. A lot of people have been saying this for a long time - Screen Resolution and Page Layout.

The new style that BBC News have just adopted shows that they now think this small resolution is now dead and finally we can use some of the unused browser space. Isn’t it so much easier to read? Lets hope everyone follows the lead if they haven’t already.