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.
Don’t leave post slugs as the default
This post is mainly aimed towards Wordpress, Textpattern and (probably) a multitude of other CMS driven website users. ‘Smart’ web software will automatically create a ‘slug’ for your new article, but it’s not always best to trust the CMS to come up with the best URL for you.
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.
Introducing Opera Face Gestures
Opera announced today that they will be introducing face gestures into future releases of their browser to help speed up browsing. It was around 8 years ago that they introduced mouse gestures, and once again it looks like they will be revolutionising the market. Although judging by the date and time of the announcement, I wouldn’t get too excited about seeing this feature any time soon ;)
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.
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.
