Unintentionally Blank

Thanks to Roger Johansson’s post on false accessibility claims on public sector websites I came across Bruce Lawson and Dan Champion’s campaign to find out what went wrong in the recent £200,000 redesign of the DTI website. The short story is that after redesigning, the DTI displayed a message on the accessibility area of their site, claiming to conform to AA-level standard of the WCAG 1.0. Bruce and Dan’s problem was that it didn’t, quite, quite obviously.

What’s This About Alt Attributes Then?

I only just found out about this awful use of taxpayers money, especially as I am about to start paying taxes myself, I decided to have a look at the DTI website to see what was wrong. To start with, I noted a table based, tag soup layout (a automatic failure of WCAG 1.0 guidelines 3.3 [use CSS for layout] and 5.3 [Do not use tables for layout]) and 69 errors (on the front page) when run through the W3C’s validator. Then I disabled images and almost fell off my chair.

Continue reading “Learning By Mistakes - The ALT Attribute” »

Thanks very much to Mostafa Mourad, a 27 year old web designer who recently discovered he was colour blind. People who are colour blind have different needs to most users of the internet, just as blind people do, but this thoughtful post seeks to enlighten the rest of us somewhat in the way that colour blind people see the world.

Yeah, I know for a link it’s taken me a while to post it, but it’s here to remind me as much as it is to show anyone else who hasn’t seen it too.

Accessibility is not just about blind users who use screenreading software to hear websites. More than a year and a half ago Joe Clark wrote an article for A List Apart under the name Big, Stark and Chunky. It brought to light a different group of web users that need to be considered when making your site accessible. There are groups of users who aren’t blind, but do have visual impairments, they don’t use screenreaders, instead tend to increase the text size on websites or use magnifiers to view the web. Joe’s article goes on to describe how a site should be designed to accomodate these users and how CSS can help. Light on dark text, single columns, simple navigation and large fonts are the keys to the design we need.

In order to increase awareness of these techniques (and show off my own style sheet switcher) I tore apart my site’s design today in order to come up with a high contrast design that would be more accessible for visually impaired users. Continue reading “High Contrast Design” »

Being relatively new to the web standards scene, and especially since I was drawn in by marvels such as the CSS Zen Garden, I have read over the many different ways of replacing text with an image. Time and time again I was disappointed with each method for one of two reasons; it used an extra empty span element or would not work in the “images off/css on” scenario. Using an extra span is unsemantic and “images off/css on” left a gap where either the image or text should have gone.

Continue reading “Image Replacement - Getting Closer?” »

I was just running through my examples yesterday evening, checking they work in IE7 when to my horror my stylesheet switcher failed miserably. I ran to IE6 to see if I had overlooked the problem for IE in general and it turned out that I had. I guess that since the majority of visitors to this site use Firefox (in which the function works perfectly) no-one else had noticed either. The strange thing was that it was only the final version that didn’t work, the first version, using just links rather than the dropdown box, did work. This means that the stylesheet switching function was working fine and there was a problem with the dropdown box.

Continue reading “Stylesheet Switcher - Part 3: Revenge Of IE” »