Tag Archives: accessibility

Kill Accessibility

May
20
2010

Stairways to nowhere

Let’s get some reality on the web accessibility debate.

We all know about WCAG 1, we have all at least had a look at the associated checklists.  If you are lucky you may have glanced at WCAG 2.

We all have been developing and designing our sites with semantic content, in compliance with W3C guidelines, using progressive enhancement for the interactive components, unobtrusive Javascript, and graceful degradation of the pages for legacy browsers.   Maybe used some of the attributes of ARIA. Sure that’s a no brainer.

We know that doing this will solve most of the accessibility issues.

A Review – Fancy Form Design

Jan
17
2010

Rating:
4.5

As I’m designing forms I don’t usually have an issue making then usable or accessible within the limits of the clients budget.

However taking the form to the next level technically can sometimes be an issue. This is exactly what Fancy Form Design by Jina Bolton, Tim Connell and Derek Featherstone is all about, designing and building those great forms on the web.

When I first purchased this book (yes I do purchase my books, they aren’t usually review freebies) I was a little skeptical as to whether this book would have any content in it that would be relevant to me. This is an issue that I’m running into more and more these days.

CSS menus why use Display:None

Dec
6
2009

Hiding In Plain Sight

You know in accessibility circles we are constantly telling people using drop down CSS menus that when the menus are not visible  we shouldn’t be using display:none to achieve this.   We all know this one, right.  Just to refresh your memory, remember the display:none rule takes an element assigned right out of the picture completely,  for anyone using a screen reader the assigned content will just not “exist”.

This is all well and good.  Well that depends, maybe there is a case for the use of display:none afterall.

9 Skills to Supplement Design

Oct
18
2008

Shag Bar...okay

I was having a discussion the other day with some fellow web designer friends on the skills that you required to be stay in this field long term.

Sure we all agreed you need to at least have the core design skills, understanding of layout, colour theory, typography and the usual tricks of the trade. The platform that you used to deliver your designs was immaterial, be that Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks or the like it didn’t really matter, the end result was what was important. That’s a given.