The main consensus is to avoid them. Why you say? Well because it’s not necessary. If you really want to open a link in another tab or window, you can do it yourself:
In Firefox, hover over the link you want to access, right-click your mouse to get a menu and click on “Open Link in [...]
Websites dedicated to online awareness and magazines alike are pushing more and more the importance of Web Standards. Sites like A List Apart has been an advocate for Web Standards and Web Accessibility for years. Wordpress, Joomla and other content management systems have embraced the principles of accessibility. Forums like Accessifyforum have also seen increased [...]
Lists can be tricky, but as long as you keep a consistent structure and the correct sequence, lists are a piece of cake.
Here are the basics to remember:
Make your menus into unordered lists,
Place the list inside a div,
Have an H2 header with menu title (hide it if not need to be visible),
The ul has no [...]
The W3C has extensive information on how to properly evaluation a sites accessibility. Here are the underlining steps to ensure that your evaluation is full-proof:
For a preliminary review, select a page that is representative of the whole site or that most people will see. Try to choose a page that has tabular data, images and [...]
Did you know that according to Statistics Canada in 2006 there was 1,289,420 Canadians with a hearing impairment, 835,960 Canadians with a seeing impairment, 2,856,820 Canadians with an agility impairment, and 752,110 Canadians with a learning impairment. In every case, around 70% of these Canadians said that they had used the Internet in the past [...]
Don’t you just love Firefox add-ons. I do! Especially because they make my life easier.
As a developer it is important to have a feel for what the user is getting out of your site. I found a good way to use a screen reader on any operating system (OS) without paying a dime. I am [...]
Ok so Canada does not have the national equivalent to the United States section 508. But if you want to know what they recommend you can read their Common Look and Feel standards for the Internet documentation. Obviously the information is for government and public sector websites, but it could be useful to get another [...]
Sure accessibility guidelines are designed to help people with disabilities access the web, but it extends to more than just them. I am talking about the elderly, people with low literacy or little fluency in the language the site is made, people that have dial-up or a low bandwidth connection, and even new or infrequent [...]
Accessibility guidelines are primarily developed for people with either visual, hearing or physical impairments and disabilities. Here are basic descriptions of some ways people with disabilities use the internet:
People with visual impairments might use a screen reader. This is a software that will read out loud the text of the web page. They might [...]
As far as I know, web accessibility in Canada is up to each province to legislate. There are several attempt to make websites accessible in government and educational institutions. Most if not all government websites in Canada are now accessible. But unfortunately, there are no laws to ensure that accessibility guidelines are respected.
A special notice [...]
I have been using this tool for some time now. It’s simple and straight forward. It will tell you if your colour combinations are good or not. Large and bolded text are categorized differently than smaller text. The program also tells you what priority your combination represents. Priority 3 (AAA) is the lowest level, so [...]
Content management systems (CMS) have become very popular in the last 3 years or so. They usually are pretty easy to install and to upgrade, but not all of them have accessibility in mind. What often happens is that the theme designer has to make it her or his business to create a site as [...]
