Here are the main things to think about when designing a website: Maintain a design and layout consistency throughout the site, Avoid clutter, Include written transcript for any audio and visual media, Avoid multiple level menus. Do not have more than two levels, Include a sitemap when your site has embed pages, Avoid making the [...]
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 [...]
www.checkmycolours.com is a website for you to easily check if the colours on your website are accessible. This tool takes all of the references to colour from your web page including your CSS and nicely compares the background colours to the foreground colours. The report that gets tabulated shows very bluntly what instance is acceptable [...]
I was going to do an evaluation of an authoring tool, but the WAI have thought of it already at www.w3.org/WAI/AU/2002/tools. I found that the reviews were all a little outdated and I didn’t get a definite conclusion from any review. So I finally decided to go ahead and check out an authoring tool myself. [...]
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 [...]
So I recently re-did one of my old websites. My client wanted to had some images so I took the opportunity to give her an accessible site. I had done this site a few years ago. I wasn’t aware back then of web standards and web accessibility. I must confess of using tables for layout. [...]
Transcript of the podcast: [Intro music] Welcome to podcast three of Thinking Accessible. On today’s podcast, I will talk to you about my four golden rules for web accessibility. Rule number 1: Provide alternative text for non-textual content. What do it mean by this? Images are non-textual content. Audio and video are non-textual content. So [...]
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 [...]
The W3C have a super neat online demonstration of visually representing web accessibility. The inaccessible pages have several “barriers”, key elements that make the page inhospitable. For example, the before home page demonstrates a lack of alternative text for each image, an inconsistency in the content order, a negligence with headings and lists, an inaccuracy [...]
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 [...]
What are web standards? Simply put, they are a set of guidelines for web development and web designing. It represents the good practices of the profession. When I started creating websites I had no idea their were rules, but now that I know they exist and I know why I need to use them I [...]
