Making A Commercial Case for Adopting Web Standards is a group dedicated to doing what its name says. There are, incidentally, quite a few business reasons to adopt web standards. Jeffrey Veen of Adaptive Path offers five: Speed Development Simplify Maintenance, Increase Opportunity Open Up Access Options Reduce Bandwidth Costs Improve User Experience Read Veen’s [...]
[7 Oct 2003]
While full accessibility is a hard goal for web developers to reach, validators can address the more common technical aspects of accessibility. Here is a list of validators, each with varying degrees of complexity and completeness. WAVE 3.0 (also available as a toolbar for Mozilla and Internet Explorer) Bobby Cynthia Says A-Prompt I personally find [...]
[10 Sep 2003]
I’m a big proponent of accessible, usable web design and development. My site, however, had several accessibility-related problems. I fixed them today. Here’s what I changed, and why. Added a ‘skip navigation’ link. The skip navigation link offers time-saving benefits for two groups of users: Aural device users Users who navigate with a keyboard Aural [...]
[5 Sep 2003]
Ian Lloyd proves that accessible does not mean ugly. There are several business reasons to improve accessibility. But as Ian says, the decision to be accessible or not often comes down to design: ‘Can it still look good?’ His article proves that the answer is ‘Yes.’ Also check out: Accessify Forum
[4 Sep 2003]
The World Wide Web Consortium has released a glossary of terms related to “device independence” — which isn’t defined in the document. Device independence is a goal of W3C standards: creating documents that are equally functional regardless of whether the user is viewing the page with a cell phone, P D A, desktop computer browser, [...]
[31 Aug 2003]
Three cheers for Jakob Neilsen’s Alertbox “PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption.” And three more cheers to Mr. Neilsen for offering a solution: gateway pages. A much simpler solution, however, is to give users contextual warnings that they’re about to launch a PDF file. For example: Tuesday Women Announces 2003 Executive Board (PDF file). Alerting users [...]
[28 Jul 2003]
Sure, in theory, making external links open in new windows helps users keep their place (on your site). But based on my own experience and some reading on accessibility and usability, I wonder if that’s entirely true. I think the pitfalls — problems for screen readers, confusion for some users, browser ‘hanging’ — outweigh the [...]
[23 Jul 2003]
Creating accessible web sites are not as hard as you think. It’s mostly a matter of proper markup. This article discusses:
Why accessibility is important
Why using style sheets is important
How style sheets can boost accessibility
[25 Apr 2003]
In the dot-com explosion, Web accessibility took a back seat to bleeding-edge design techniques. But with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act going into effect, Web accessibility now is a hot topic. Here’s why every Web designer and developer should start creating more accessible Web sites.
[25 Apr 2003]