Accessibility... The BasicsWritten by Alan Cole
An accessible website is one that allows as many people as possible to access infomation contained within it. An inportant subset of accessibility is allowing people with visual, aural, or physical disabilities full access to information and services available in same way as able-bodied people. Ensuring that your website is not dependant on particular hardware or software is also an important consideration when building accessible websites.Is it worth it? - At least 10% of population in most countries has disabilities; visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities can all affect access to Web.
- Average age of population in many countries is increasing; aging sometimes results in combinations of accessibility issues; vision & hearing changes, changes in dexterity & memory.
- Many elderly and disabled people rely increasingly on internet to obtain their goods and services.
Few organizations can afford to deliberately miss this market sector. On top of this, accessible web design contributes to advantages for able-bodies users too. Accessible websites: - Allow access to users of mobile phones, small display scress, Web-TV and web-kiosks and other new web=enabled devices.
- Increases usability in low bandwidth or slow connection situations.
- Provide access across a wider range of computer hardware and software.
Other extremely important benefits that make accessible websites worthwhile are that: - Many governments now require certain websites to conform to accessibility guidellines.
- Accessible websites are easier to index by search engines and therefore help drive traffic to your site.
| | Clever Web Designing hintsWritten by Maricon Williams
Some software tools are claiming that designing is easy as 123 and that they will ‘produce’ pages for you. Unfortunately, a number of web designers are victimized by this marketing gimmick. The results are obvious. A number of operating systems have pages that are not seen properly by intended surfers. Some are unreadable. Some are difficult to navigate. Most of them do not serve their purpose.To help some amateur web designers out there, I have here a list of established rules of thumb in web designing. This may help you in creating functional and arty wed sites. 1.A picture is worth a thousand words thus, you need not stuff your page with a truckload of images. Pictures and images are used to enhance page and not to mess it up. Bear in mind that less is beautiful. The average time to load a page should not take longer than 5 seconds. If it’s longer than that, surfers might click away elsewhere. Therefore, you must keep page size less than 30k. Each file on page should have a separate HTTP request to server. Lots of small images will slow down loading. Other factors that contribute to slowing down of loading are height and width attributes. Without these, browser should wait for image to download since it has no idea of how much space to leave for them. 2.Navigability and functionality come before artistic excellence. It is no use making your site a masterpiece of art if users cannot navigate around it. 3.Keep web site simple. 4.Whenever your whole page is within a table whole page cannot render until whole table is downloaded. To remedy this, split table into two and let top one be a short table that displays only page header and a small number of navigation links. 5.Stay away from all browser-specific functions. If a certain feature is supported by one browser, it will most definitely not be supported by another. Where you must use such features, it should not hinder display of page in other browser which does not support such functionality.
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