Accessibility... The Basics

Written by Alan Cole


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What does it entail? Many techniques involved in making your website accessible will have no effect whatsoever onrepparttar final look and feel of your site forrepparttar 132196 majority of users. It will however allow users with disabilities to use assitive devices such as screen readers (to read text out aloud to them) and assistive input devices (for people with physical disabilities) to access and use your site. Some ofrepparttar 132197 key concepts are:

  • To provide textual alternatives for all images and animations
  • To ensure that textual content can be resized torepparttar 132198 users peronsal preference
  • To ensure sufficient contrast between text colour and background colour
  • To ensure that hyperlinks contain text that describes their purpose.
  • To ensure that hyperlinks are large enough to make them easy to select
  • To use a consistent and easy to navigate layout

Other benefits The robots that search engines use to catalogue your website are essentially 'blind' visitors to your site. Accessible websites are therefore more search engine friendly and result in better search engine rankings and ultimately more visitors to your site. Other advantages include:

  • Better structure means easier and cheaper site maintenance
  • Accessible sites demonstrate that your organiation takes its social responsibilty seriously
  • Increased support for internationalisation
  • Reduces hosting costs
I believe accessibility is beneficial for all involved and should be a consideration of every website.

Alan Cole runs www.pixelwave.co.uk, a one-person web design studio. His aim is to provide cost effective website design production and maintenance by offering professional web solutions that stand out from the crowd.


Clever Web Designing hints

Written by Maricon Williams


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6.Do not clutterrepparttar screen with new popup windows. An exception though, may be made for pages containing a links list. It is convenient in such cases to open links in another window, so thatrepparttar 132193 user can come back torepparttar 132194 links page easily.

7.Bear in mindrepparttar 132195 fonts-challenged users too. Font should therefore be readable. Stay clear of out-of-the-way hard-to-find fonts. Use simple fonts like Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, and Courier.

8.A new design trick that is increasingly being used onrepparttar 132196 web these days. It looks something like this: Home > Section > Subsection > Page

9.Use Java as a utilitarian programming language, not as a graphics front-end for your photos or images. There are various things you can do with Java but it doesn’t mean you’ll have to do it all. Java applets are known to run slower, so users experience certain lethargy in performance. And worse still, Java has been known to crash certain browsers.

10.Use META tags. Search Engines heavily rely uponrepparttar 132197 Keywords & Description Meta tags to populate their search database.

11.Write for all browsers, all resolutions, and all color-depths. If you show people pages that look best with their own browser and their own resolution that makes users feel ‘at home’, and you get a better response. Web Designing is a combination of creative skills and technical prowess – and one is no less important thanrepparttar 132198 other. A good web site onrepparttar 132199 other hand, is like an efficient frontline which can spellrepparttar 132200 difference between casual surfer and a potential customer. Web designers are tasked to yield benefits that will redound torepparttar 132201 company. This is quite a hard task however you can always rely on both your skills andrepparttar 132202 right tools!

Additional Information aboutrepparttar 132203 article can be found at http://www.fullcolorprintingcompany.com

I love reading. Give me a book and I'll finish it in one sitting. Reading is the chance to be transported to a different world and so is writing.


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