FodnessMemo25

Two issues have arisen in the past four years which have come together to result in a push for greater standards compliance and accessibility of websites. The latest round of browser releases (most notably with Internet Explorer 8) has resulted in an extensive push by standards compliance advocates for browsers to be standards-compliant. Browser standards compliance is an important first step in (X)HTML and CSS compliance, since "branching code" would no longer be required. (Branching code is when code is changed based on the browser in use - if (Internet Explorer) do X, if (Firefox) do Y, etc - which is caused by browsers not complying with published W3C standards.) Standards compliance of (X)HTML code makes accessibility features either work automatically in some cases (such as providing the required ALT tag on IMG tags) and at a minimum makes adding accessibility code later a significantly easier task. The push for accessible websites came in the wake of the 2006 National Federation for the Blind lawsuit against Target, which established a legal precedent for corporations to be sued if their websites were not accessible to individuals with disabilities. Corporations are now becoming more aware of the need for standards compliant and accessible websites, and are beginning to value programmers who are trained in standards compliance and programming for accessibility.