Posts Tagged ‘Accessibility’

Why web developer’s should care about accessibility

// January 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Strategy

Web accessibility refers to:

..the practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities and the principle that all web users should have access to information available on the internet.

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You can be assured that many surfers on the net may be blind or visually impaired, motor impaired, paralysed. This is generally what we think of when the word “impaired” is used. However, it is important to broaden this view of impaired as it relates to accessibility. This would include cross-browser compatibility issues. If i can’t view information on my browser of choice, Safari, then the information is inaccessible. Further, lets consider the aging population of baby boomer’s rampant on the web. We have to consider text size as well! Don’t we? There is also the wide use of mobile browser’s to consider too. As a developer/designer i can get lazy and not implement strict practices of adhering to WACG.

Why it is important to design accessible web pages?

  • – Increase market share and audience reach. By not locking out a large portion of users, you are of course opening the door for them.
  • – Increase search engine listings and discovery. Seriously, a lot of the techniques employed while building accessible sites really do aid SEO. Cleaner code is easier to parse. Alternative text helps to describe your site and provides additional content. Captions, table summaries, text descriptions, anchor titles and meta-data all provide additional descriptive data bout your site.
  • – Improve efficiency by reducing maintenance and sometimes bandwidth.
  • – Demonstrate social responsibility.
  • – Reduce the risk of any legal implications.

W3C: World Wide Web Consortium. www.w3.org. The W3C is an international consortium founded by Tim Berners-Lee (the guy who is labeled as inventing the World Wide Web, there’s some serious gravitas behind that title!) and others. The consortium consists of member organisations, full-time staff and general webheads who work together to develop the net, raise understanding of the correct ways to build sites, create new technologies and work with all kinds of companies and people to help make the web a better place.

WAI: Web Accessibility Initiative. www.w3.org/WAI/.

In their own words, “the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) works with organizations around the world to develop strategies, guidelines, and resources to help make the Web accessible to people with disabilities.” The WAI offers 3 levels of access. The relatively easily achieved Priority 1 through to the the master level at Priority 3. The reason that there are 3 levels is because it is understood that you can’t just expect everyone to become accessibility gurus overnight. Like transitional DOCTYPES, this allows continuous development and an evolving understanding of web standards and accessibility.

Section 508. www.section508.gov.

Section 508 is one of the few legal acts concerned with user experience and disability discrimination on the net. Becoming law in 2001, it dictates how sites should cater for various disabled users. Although it only applies to federal agencies and government sponsored activities, 508 sets a precedence that should be acknowledged by all designers.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) represented the first major effort to establish guidelines for accessible design. This standard consists of 14 guidelines, each with three checkpoint levels for web developers to meet: Priority One, Priority Two, and Priority Three.

In individual countries, national standards emerged later. Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act is based on WCAG Priority One checkpoints. These same checkpoints serve as the basis for standards in Australia, France, Germany, and many other countries. The Common Look and Feel standard in Canada and Guidelines for U.K. Government Web Sites in the United Kingdom are based on Priorities One and Two of the WCAG.

What to look for in a web designer?

// September 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Strategy

  1. Accessibility - This does not only mean that it is accessible to disabled people. An accessible site is one that can be viewed and read appropriately by people with slow internet connections, various plugins switched off such as javascript, and in all the many browsers that are available etc. It is a very import aspect to web design in that you want your site to be as accessible to as many people, browsers, and systems as possible.  There exist accessibility tests and are 3 different levels depending on your target market.
  2. Usability - Usability involves various factors. Primarily it involves the way the site is read and navigated from a user’s perspective. This all starts from the way a site is coded.
  3. Coded in CSS, Mark up should be semantic. No tables. Web technology is moving forwards all the time, and if your designer is still using spliced images, spacer gifs or even bad css (css that only works in one browser) its not good.  It is also important that it is coded correctly, so make sure that they do the basics, like put headings in h1,h2 or h3 tags and navigations in lists. If you can’t be bothered, try asking them if it validates.
  4. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), On page search engine optimization (AKA SEO) is a process that builds/ensures/re-builds some or all of your websites’ content and tags in a way that promotes certain keywords. Those keywords and phrases should be chosen carefully and are dependent on search popularity. Basic SEO done by a designer during development without SEO/SEM experience will not guarantee you a decent place in search engines. There are many other ways to make sure your site is a high ranker, but this takes a lot of time once the site is live, if you want this to continue then you will definitely need to pay your web designer for their time, or take some of it on board yourself. Its a form of marketing that should be important to any business.
  5. Use of flash, Flash should only be used for banner ads, diagrams, games etc. It shouldn’t really be used for the main navigation. Flash changes all the time, so some people may not have the version of flash that you do. Search engines are only just beginning to crawl flash. Mostly there is nothing you can do in flash that you can’t do with css and/or degradeable javascript on a navigation anyway.
  6. Design, I know this is purely a matter of taste, but if you want a modern and future proof website, look around the internet, do your research, find websites that look like they are in fashion, because the last thing you want is an ugly website that looks like its from the 1990s for the next 5 years. Consistency is so important. If your site looks like some sort of mishmash you aren’t going to win any awards. 1 bit of advice I have is, don’t just go for the flashy designer. They might be excellent at making things look pretty, but they also need to be able to code the site properly, if necessary delegate the work to different people. A designer and a coder.
  1. Standards, If your web guy/girl is telling you something you aren’t sure about, check out what other websites do and make sure that your site follows standards that other websites adhere to. For example, a guy I know is setting up a website and he has been told that the best way for the users to make payments is by them paying through their phone bill. No one I know would trust this sort of payment system. And if you look around, the sorts of payment methods that are available are used as standard on all of the big sites such as ebay, amazon etc. It is what people trust.