The W3C has just issued the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as a Proposed Recommendation. This document has been slowly coming together over the past months. It includes a comprehensive checklist of design points to ensure that sites are accessible by people of all levels of physical and mental ability. There's been a lot of misleading reports in the industry about the Americans with Disabilities Act that have suggested that all sites must conform to the act. In reality, it's just federal sites that have to conform but everyone should be reading these guidelines and then thinking again about the usability and design of their web sites.