How to ensure your website is accessible and usableGet Web Design Tips and Tricks on mps-web-design.com. How to ensure your website is accessible and usable topic will increase your understanding on Web Design Tips and Tricks. We at mps-web-design.com only provide news, articles, information in Web Design Tips and Tricks. Web Design Tips and Tricks at mps-web-design.com provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
Here are some accessibility tips to bear in mind whilst creating your site: Navigation You should resist the temptation to use images or Flash for links on your site, and rather use text based links. This helps with accessibility, search engine spidering and ensures that navigation links can be traversed using the tab key as well as the mouse. The ability to use the keyboard to move around the site is an important accessibility requirement to ensure those who cannot use a mouse for a variety of reasons are not disadvantaged by your site. Alt Tags Ensure all images have alt tags - or alternative text - attached to them. This is a key accessibility requirement, to ensure that those who cannot view images, or choose to browse without images, can view all of your site without disadvantage. Alt tags should be descriptive and relevant to each image, rather than generic or used as a place to stuff keywords that are irrelevant to the image. Keep them sort and to the point - if the image is of a man parachuting, then label it as 'man parachuting'. There is no need to prefix with the word 'image:' as many text to speech browsers will add this automatically, thus the listener will here 'image image' if you also insert the word image! Flash When it comes to accessibility, one of the biggest barriers can be Flash. Flash must therefore only be used sparingly and only to add nice to have touches rather than important content. As well as being slow to load, Flash is often stripped out by firewalls or switched off in the web browser. The accessibility of Flash content is very poor as it is impossible for a search engine to know what a Flash banner is displaying. Therefore use Flash with caution. Colours Be sensible with your colour scheme! Ensure that you use colours that go well together and are easy on the eye. Therefore don't use colours that clash, are too similar or too light to be read easily on screen. There are tools you can use to see how your colour scheme will look to those with various types of colour blindness - well worth checking out. Font sizing Ensure that if possible you do not fix the font size, but rather allow site visitors to adjust font size as per their requirements - either making it larger and easier to read, or perhaps even smaller. Therefore don't set absolute pixel sizing in your style declarations.
In summary be considerate for your whole audience, who will also be using a variety of browsers and monitors to view your site. It is therefore well worth running your site through a text only browser such as Lynx to see how it displays there, and also run your code through a code validator to ensure that any mistakes are ironed out before you go live.
Article Index: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 |
More Articles:1. Online Businesses Still Ignoring Dial-up Market By Roderick Coleman In this article you will find the parallel between two Internet connections that makes serious actions trough financial market, leading this to great profits or huge losses.The first type of connection that it will be detailed is Dial-up connection.The main advantage of Dial-up is that it is not requiring any additional infrastructure less than the telephonic line. So, wherever there is a telephone line you can access the Internet, even in rural or remote areas.But this connection is full of d… 2. Why You Should Stick to Design Conventions A mistake often made by people who are new to web design is thinking that they shouldn't pay any attention to what has come before: they're going to design a website the way they think one should work. You have to realise, though, that there's a difference between being innovative and being arrogant. In almost all cases, you should be sticking to the conventions that have gradually developed during the life of the web so far. There are Millions of Websites Why would you need to do that? Well, if… 3. Creating a Robots.txt file Some people believe that they should create different pages for different search engines, each page optimized for one keyword and for one search engine. Now, while I don't recommend that people create different pages for different search engines, if you do decide to create such pages, there is one issue that you need to be aware of.These pages, although optimized for different search engines, often turn out to be pretty similar to each other. The search engines now have the ability to detect whe… 4. 8 Steps to Design a Surfer Friendly Website That Search Engines Love! Eight Steps to Design a Surfer Friendly Website That Search Engines LoveBy Venkata Ramana1) Crystal Clear Source Code (HTML/CSS)Many web-designers give far too much importance to the look and the graphics of the website while ignoring the clarity of the source code. Clean and well-written source code is the first step to website design success. If a spider cannot find your keywords, you might just as well forget about search engine optimization.2) Keywords in Title Tags.Keywords in the title tag… |
||||
