Dear Lori and Rat's Brats,
 
As a professional web developer, I concur with Patti Higgins comments
regarding dreamweaver, especially the latest version.  The accessibility
features in Dreamweaver MX allow you to make fully section 508 and W3C
Web Accessibility Initiative comliant pages.  However for most people,
Dreamweaver is very much overkill, now having become positions for the
higher end of the professional marketplace - it costs around $400.
 
Now here's somewhat of a nice way of getting a substantial cut in price.
If you are a student or a teacher, Dreamweaver costs only $100.  The
Studio package, consisting of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Freehand and Flash,
costs only $200 - commercially its around $900.  However you have to be
affiliated with an educational institution to qualify.  If you're not,
talk with a friend, relative etc who is.
 
Anyhow here are some other accessibility resources that you might find
useful World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative
guidelines and page checker: http://www.w3.org/WAI/
 
Center for Applied Special Technology: http://www.CAST.org
They produce a free on-line accessibility checker that's now at
http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp
This is one of the best checkers around.  I use it on most of the
sites I develop.
 
Macromedia also has a great accessibility resource center:
http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/accessibility/
 
As for hand coding, I use a mixture of both hand coding (I program in
ColdFusion, and its faster and more efficient to do so by hand rather
than use Dreamweaver as far as I am concerned) and using Dreamweaver's
graphic interface.  However I would recommend that you learn to fully
handcode the HTML first, that way if something gets messed up that the
program cannot fix, you most likely will be able to fix it using NotePad,
TextEdit etc.
 
best regards,
 
larry
(owned by the Gang of Four - Ryoga, Possum, Augustus, and Osmar)
 
PS, Augustus sailed through his surgery - so far he's doing great.  I'll
have some pre and post op pictures up within a couple of days - I have to
edit them a bit etc.  - larry
 
--
 
Larry C. Lyons
 
========================================================
Life is Complex. It has both real and imaginary parts.
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Chaos, Panic and Disorder. My work here is done.
[Posted in FML issue 4033]