Posts in: Accessibility
- Accessibility improvements to this site
- 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 device users won’t have [...] [5 Sep 2003]
- “Attractive, Accessible Web Sites”
- 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]
- Glossary of Terms for Device Independence
- 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]
- P D F bites (online at least)
- 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 contextual help means [...] [28 Jul 2003]
- Should external links open in a new window?
- 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]
- The World Wide Web Consortium releases new accessibility standards
- Take a look at the W 3 C’s working draft of the next-generation of web accessibility standards. [7 Jul 2003]
