Accessibility

Over the years of being a freelance web designer, I’ve been developing my own processes for the business of designing websites. One of those processes has been compiling a list of tasks that need to be completed before launching a website, whether it be a new site or a redesign. This list is kept in a spreadsheet which I work through, ticking off each item after the client has given final sign off for the site to go live. I view it as my final quality control procedure and I usually find that the process will highlight a few of the ‘little things’ that I might have overlooked in general development. Usually nothing too major; more a case of ‘dotting all the Is and crossing all the Ts’.

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It may only be a very small amendment, but I’ve just updated the HTML of this site to bring it in line with the new Microformats Value Class Pattern which has just been released as an alpha draft.

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If you’re interested in website accessibility best practices, you might have come across warnings against using display: none to hide content that you don’t want to appear on screen. The argument is that content hidden with display: none can’t be accessed by people using screen readers, and the recommended solution is to position the content offscreen instead using a large negative position (let’s call this the offset method). But this shouldn’t be a hard and fast rule for all situations. There are some situations for which using display: none will be acceptable.

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Following on from my last post in which I mentioned screenreaders (or alternatives) that people might like to try for checking their own sites’ accessibilty, and an earlier post in which I listed the extensions I use for web development with Firefox, I thought I’d also list the different tools I use for testing website accessibility.

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Victor Tsaran, an engineer and Program Manager for Accessibility at Yahoo!, has put together a 27-minute video introducing screen readers and how they interact with web pages.

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Dropdowns (horizontal) or flyout (vertical) menus abound on websites and come in many different flavours. They are also put together in a number of different ways, some done with javascript, some with ‘pure’ CSS and some a mixture of both.

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There are already several excellent articles discussing the sliding door tabs technique for creating navigation elements, so why do we need another one?

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