XHTML 1.1 - Served as application/xhtml+xml
Are You Accessible?
How to get Accessible
Are You Accessible?
The latest buzzword in web design (with standards) is accessibility. With the website accessibility on this site should clear up a few issues for you.
Tim Berners-Lee
W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web
UsableNet.com
"The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."
Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web
Is your site accessible? Run your site through these quick suggestions:
- Turn off graphics
- Turn off sounds
- Check the contrast by viewing the page in greyscale
- Turn off style sheets
- Turn off scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects
- Use the largest font size allowed by a browser
- Resize the browser window
- Select all text and copy it into a word processor to make sure it makes sense
Of course, there are online validators, and you'll want to run your site through them:
Develop your sites for a standard compliant browser first then modify for IE/Win
Develop your sites for a standard compliant browser first, and then add workarounds for Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows (MSIE/Win). I picked up this tip while reading through, 'Throwing Tables Out the Window', by Douglas Bowman; an article about how he used CSS to re-do the layout of the Microsoft home page.
Instead of concentrating on getting your design to work in Internet Explorer on the PC (the most popular web browser), he recommends that you do all your initial work and testing using a more standards compliant browser. This approach will cut the time you have to spend creating the inevitable workarounds required once you discover that your design falls apart in every other browser apart from yours. :-)
The thrust of the argument:
It is easier to tweak a standards compliant website to work in the Internet Explorer, than it is to fix a site optimized for IE/Win to work in more standard compliant browsers.
Copyright © 2002, 2003, 2004, by Jim Byrne. All rights reserved. Jim is a recognised authority on accessible web design, author of Making Websites Accessible (SAIF, 2002), and Accessible Web Typography (ScotConnect 2003). He was a founder member of the award winning, accessible web design consultancy established in 1996, "The Making Connections Unit" ( http://www.mcu.org.uk).
Back to topSo you see, website accessibility is something every web designer is responsible for.
