For those interested and committed to building and improving their sites for accessibility, there is a recently published, useful (and free) resource: Just Ask: integrating accessibility throughout design. Promoted today at the Web Standards Project, Just Ask has been very favorably reviewed by Accessify.com, and is also available in Spanish and Japanese. A great addition to the canon on design for accessibility. (And if you are interested in a good book on the technical aspects of web standards-driven accessibility, consider Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance.)

Nielsen Norman Group, the consulting arm of Jakob Nielsen’s Useit.com web usability empire, has gotten the holiday spirit by making available via free download its 124-page report on Making the Web Easy to Use for Users with Disabilities. Originally published in 2001, the report is dated but is a worthy introduction and overview to critical web design issues affecting access by those using assistive technologies. Should this report pique your interest, you can find a more current, more broadly written, and technically more helpful canon in Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance.