Amplimark | Amplified Marketing

Web Accessibility 101

September 4th, 2010

Web accessibility considerations are often put on the backburner to cust costs or speed up project delivery. Sometime web designers choose to ignore web accessibility because of a narrow focus on a certain visitor demographic. However, both of these practices can cost dearly in long run.

Every web design project should have a web accessibility checklist and it should be put near the top of the priority list of items to implement.

So what exactly is a web accessibility checklist and what should be on this list?

Web accessibility list is a common sense design practice. If you’re building an office, you’ll consider handicap accessibility options and final design should incorporate these design elements. Web accessibility is the online flavor that represent these design elements. Web accessibility is also important if you want to improve the user experience and usability of your online website.

While web accessibility checklist can be thoroughly detailed and exhaustive, here is a brief and consise summary of common design practices.

1. All images and animations must have an ALT description:
This is just common sense. The Alt attribute describes the purpose of the graphic element. An empty or null alt attribute (alt =”") can also seperate decorative images from the images that convey some information. This can help in separating content from presentation layer is a good design process.

2. Using longdesc attribute to describe content in detail:There is a good reason it is called longdesc. Most of the time designers tend to get lazy and use alt tag instead. However, longdesc should be used to describe content on detail and link to text files that may contain additional details.
Example :

 <img src="/images/population_growth.gif" longdesc="This chart shows population growth in the state of New York, USA."/>
 <img src="/images/population_growth.gif" longdesc="/documents/population.txt"/>

3. Color Considerations:
Sometime we use color to convey certain information. Remember, color definition can change from one plateform to another(example: Windows based PC to Macintosh).
Also, there are people who are color blind. As a good design practice all information conveyed with color should be available if color is removed.

4. Text and Graphics Links:
Links need to make sense and should avoid a guessing game. For example, “click here to download our Brochure” is far more useful than “Click here”.

5. List elements:
Make sure list elements are created using

<ul> and <ol></ol></ul>

instead of background images. It is important to separate design from content as well as avoiding unneccesary data that a user will have to download to consume a list designed with images.

6. Use the latest W3C guidelines:
For example, use

 <strong> </strong>

for bold instead of

 <b></b>

and

 <em></em>

for italics instead of

 <i> </i>

7. If you must use image maps, please make sure you have alt descriptions and redundant text links.

8. Any presentation elements; such as color, font, typeface, object positioning must be controlled by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

9. If you use forms on your website, make sure forms use

 <label for="firstname">First Name</label>
<input type="text" name="firstname" id="firstname" taborder="1"/>

10. If tables are used for layout, they must be linearize correctly.

11. If using tables for data, make sure header cells are labeled with

 <th> </th>

a summary attribute in the

 <table> </table>

element to provide description of what
the data is.
Example:

 <table width="95%" border="0" summary="Product pricing information"> </table>

12. A document type declaration (DOCTYPE) is the 1st line of the document (HTML 4.01 Transitional or XHTML) and the lang=”en” or another language tag is declared.

13. Event handlers must have another event trigger (mouse and keyboard)
Example:

 onClick and onKeypress
onMouseover and onFocus
onMouseout and onBlur

14. Don’t get too fancy. do not use blinking or flickering content.

15. Make sure no deprecated HTML code is present.

Thinking Outside the Box

August 28th, 2010

Sometime it is not what you do but how you do it. For example, when it comes to hunting most people think that a superior weapon is all they need to have a successful hunting excursion. This conventional thinking has value but it fails “Outside the box thinking” test.

To further solidify this argument, here is a good example:

Spider monkeys are very difficult animal to hunt in the Amazon rainforests. If you don’t have technology on your side, it is almost impossible to hunt spider monkeys – unless you deploy non-conventional means.

In order to catch spider monkeys, hunters in South America simply walk through the jungle and drop heavy containers on the ground. These containers have very a narrow top and a wider bottom. Inside the containers the hunters drop a special kind of nut, which is particularly attractive to the monkeys. Sometime later, the spider monkeys come down from the tops of the trees, smell the nut, but the tops of the containers are so narrow they have a tight squeeze to get their hands inside. Once they grab the nut at the bottom, their fist is too large to remove if through the opening. And the container is too heavy for them to carry.

So instead of letting go of the nut, the monkeys just sit there until the hunters come back, pick them up, and throw them in a bag.

The spider monkeys are not prepared to let go of a small nut in order to gain something far bigger – their freedom.

It’s a tragedy to see so many small business owners subscribe to this very dangerous thought process. They deeply desire a successful business, but they refuse to let go of a comfortable life in order to pursue a dream.

Face up to the reality of your REAL dream; don’t deny what you really want. Don’t allow a certain set of “comfort-zone” circumstances break the small window of opportunity to live your best life. The biggest success stories can always be traced back to an individual breaking out of their comfort zone. I hope you decide to break out of yours.

Results Driven SEO

Need Results? At Amplimark, we are dedicated to providing you with results driven SEO using white hat techniques only.

Campaigns That Work

Stop wasting your money with average PPC campaign managers and take control of your search engine marketing efforts.

Improve User Experience

Looking for an expert to pinpoint exactly why visitors leave your web site? Let us show you what you are missing.