Web accessiblity in mind (WebAIM) have published results of their screen reader survey. While reports are often boring, they are often very useful, and this is one of those reports. Screen reader use is often forgotten during the build of a website in the jungle of SEO and the like. The report graphs things like how people browse sites (i.e. whether headings are useful), how often they find skip links and how often other usability good-practices are encountered. Give it a read and improve your web build process.
8 Tips for Maintaining a User Friendly Site in One Hour a Month
I’m sure it’s happened to you. It’s always happening to me. How easy is it to build ‘My awesome website’ which is beautifully SEO’d, completely accessible to everyone and everything only to find that after launch, it quickly turns into ‘My messy website 3.0′. It could be broken links or images, spelling mistakes or pages which somehow magically stop working. The UX Booth has written a brilliant article with suggestions as to what to check for and why it’s important. And hey, an hour a month isn’t that much time, is it.
Progressive Enhancement: What It Is, And How To Use It?
Progressive enhancement. Another of those web buzz words. One that I’m guilty of using. But what does it actually mean? More importantly, how do you do it? What is it for? Why should you use it? Is it difficult? All very good questions, all answered in this new post on Smashing Magazine.
CSS Naked Day
What a bloomin’ marvellous idea. On CSS naked day (9th April this year), you might notice a lot of websites loose thier styling. It’s the brain child of Dustin Diaz, and it’s aim is to help us all to write more semantic (X)HTML. By considering the design with no CSS, it forces us to write better and better structured markup. Will you be joining in this year?
AJAX is easy, but remember accessibility
AJAX is easy. It’s just javascript talking to your server to grab a little bit of content instead of the browser grabbing the whole thing. With this in mind, let’s get to work and build a simple AJAX application that will work with javascript turned off. We’ll do this by assuming that there is no javascript in your user’s browser, then use jQuery to change the DOM to add in the behaviours.
Effective browser support
Paul Boag has written an excellent article about why you shouldn’t have a bunch of ’supported browsers’, you should write clean HTML and CSS with NO HACKS. Then more advanced features like rounded corners in CSS3 for browsers that support it. And the stupid browsers will ignore the enhancements, but still be usable and accessible.
Better, faster and more robust rollovers with CSS sprites
Learn how to create faster, standards compliant, javascript-less and accessible buttons using only CSS. Even the most hard-core of javascript programmers will admit that actually, they might have done this by mistake. And I promise to show you how, and if you’re lucky explain why.
I’ll even tell you what a sprite is.
