An amusing site on the web bears a note on the home page saying, 'this site best seen...if you come round my house and look at it on my monitor'.

A bit silly perhaps, but the author has a very valid point - you can never be sure how your site's going to look - some people may be accessing it through text only screens, with older or non standard browsers or using specialist software to counteract disabilities (like text to speech browsers).

With this is mind, the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative has issued a comprehensive set of guidelines on how to make your site open to as many people as possible.

In some cases, accessibility may well become a legally enforced issue.

In the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) ensures that providers of a service cannot discriminate against people by reason of their disability and although no cases have yet been brought to court, many feel that it is only a matter of time - after all, why should some people be excluded from enjoying the web like everyone else?