#22398
Accessible And Attractive Websites
And, as a result, selling the concept is never all that easy. Sure, you can harp on about all the 'business benefits' (potential increased audienced, reduced bandwidth costs, good PR), but what you really need to be able to do is show that it's possible to do this without compromising on the design. That's often where the problems begin.
Lloyd, Ian. SitePoint (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility
#22954
Ask anyone who has had to fix a Website that's littered with accessibility howlers, and top-most in their list of problems encountered will be forms, closely followed by tables. These two topics always seem to present the most difficulties, but they needn't be a problem. For the most part, forms are a problem because the extra accessibility tags are simply not known to the Web designer -- after all, it looks right, it seems to work... what's the problem? Only by switching off the monitor and using a screen-reader can our oblivious Web developer understand the issues.
Lloyd, Ian. SitePoint (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Forms
#22935
When Apple released Safari on to the unsuspecting world in 2003, it caught a lot of people off guard. The ripples are still being felt - Mozilla's source code was rejected in favour of the smaller code base of KHTML, and more recently Opera has suggested that it may no longer make a version of its browser for the Macintosh platform. And then, of course, there's the whole issue of how web developers can keep up with yet another browser foisted upon them - does it support agreed web standards? Or does it break standards-compliant sites in horrible new inventive ways?
Lloyd, Ian and Garrett Smith. Accessify (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Web Browsers
#23171
How Nationwide Tackled Accessibility - The Whole Story
A piece written by Ian Lloyd (Accessify bod) about how accessibility was worked into the project management life cycle.
Lloyd, Ian. Usability News (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility
#21552
Strategies for building a custom 404 page that enhances usability and makes the most of an otherwise lost cause.
Lloyd, Ian. List Apart, A (2004). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design
#32008
Setting and Retrieving Accesskeys with JavaScript and DOM
There are some things in the world of accessibility that appear, on the face of it, to be really wonderful ideas… until you scratch slightly below the service. What may seem feasible when putting together some guidelines on accessibility might not ultimately translate well to a real-world application. Hands up who can remember the last time they felt compelled to use a longdesc attribute? And what about the accesskey attribute? Oh, you have used them you say. OK, let’s back up a little and find out what went wrong here.
Lloyd, Ian. Vitamin (2008). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>JavaScript
#33132
Ask anyone who has had to fix a Website that's littered with accessibility howlers, and top-most in their list of problems encountered will be forms, closely followed by tables. These two topics always seem to present the most difficulties, but they needn't be a problem. For the most part, forms are a problem because the extra accessibility tags are simply not known to the Web designer -- after all, it looks right, it seems to work... what's the problem? Only by switching off the monitor and using a screen-reader can our oblivious Web developer understand the issues.
Lloyd, Ian. SitePoint (2003). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Forms
#34001
Forms are often the most tricky aspect of web development for beginners to get their head around, largely because it means stepping out of the comfort zone of one-way information - no longer are you simply presenting information at the person viewing your site, now you are asking for input, for feedback that you have to process in some way. And just as it may be difficult for HTML beginners to understand just how they handle form data, so is it difficult to understand some of the issues relating to accessibility.
Lloyd, Ian. Web Standards Project (2004). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Forms
