Date: 01/12/06 (WebDesign)    Keywords: web

I'm the webmaster for my local city government. Because it's a government site, we have to have something that's W3C complaint, or "handicap accessible," if you will. Right now there's a text-only version of the site. However, it's horribly out of date, and quite frankly, it's a pain in the ass. What'd love to be able to do is just modify the main site, cityoffrederick.com, to be complaint, and then can the text-only site.

I've done a lot of reading up on making websites w3c complaint (alt tags for images, good color contrast, etc.), but I guess I'm still not sure exactly what I'm getting into. The site doesn't have a lot of pictures, the design is really very basic, and I use Dreamweaver MX. The layout is done in tables, and I have no idea if that messes up accessiblity or not.

So, my question is, based on what I have to work with, does it make sense to go through and modify each page (there's hundreds of 'em), OR would that be SO much work (or so out of reach based on the current design) that I might as well revise the text-only site and keep that going? I don't mind a lot of "one-time" work to bring the main site up to speed if it means getting rid of the text-only. I guess I'm just not entirely sure whether that's possible with the curent layout and all the tables.

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/webdesign/1042058.html