The World Wide Web is in fact a global environment, with many languages as well as religions, customs, and ways of life. Creating visually stimulating designs that work for your clients—no matter how near or far they might be requires an understanding of a variety of practices: excellent Web graphic design skills and an awareness of the psychology of color and space.  Read more

The final piece to take into consideration when developing a purely unobtrusive web application is to make sure that your events will work even without the use of a mouse. By doing this, you help two groups of people: those in need of accessibility assistance (vision-impaired users), and people who don’t like to use a mouse. (Sit down one day, disconnect your mouse from your computer, and learn how to navigate the Web using only a mouse.  Read more

Pseudo-Classes and Pseudo-Elements.These kind of selectors allow that styles are applied to pieces of a document, based on something else than the structure of the document. The styles are based on circumstances that can not be predicted in advance. Pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements can be used in CSS selectors, but do not exist in the HTML source.  Read more

The WCAG contains many valuable strategies for opening your site’s doors as widely as possible. But they do not always map to common, real-world scenarios. Designers and developers often find themselves following the spirit of accessibility without adhering to every letter of the law, because at the end of the day, common sense will dictate what is in the best interest of your visitors. Some Priority Level 3 requirements are as easy and useful to implement as Level 1, just as some Level 1 requirements are nearly impossible to objectively quantify. For instance, checkpoint 14.1, required for Level 1 compliance—“Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site’s content”—is an area where many feel the W3C itself falls short. They might disagree, and how could you argue with them if they did? What quantifiable measuring sticks do web developers have to rate content? It’s important to dispel the myth that accessible sites must be ugly. Too many designers equate accessibility with all-text documents without visual formatting or decorative images. This could not be further from the truth. Ninety-nine percent of accessibility is achieved within the markup (the one notable exception being accommodating the visually impaired with wise color choices), so even the most beautiful sites can welcome all visitors. The bolt tightening and pipe cleaning that needs to be done under a corporate website’s hood is usually quite minimal. The value that a few pieces of additional markup brings to the table is enormous. If Target had put just a few extra hours of spit and polish into their HTML, they might have completely avoided a costly and widely publicized lawsuit. The rest of this chapter will explore some tactics for better real-world accessibility—changes that will directly benefit visitors without getting hung up on explicit WCAG compliance.   Read more

Building accessible websites is a habit. It’s a mindset that should be adopted from the first day of planning to the last hour of quality assurance. An architect plans the wheelchair ramps from the first building blueprints; a developer should always reference a mental checklist of accessibility considerations from the first wireframes and comps in Photoshop. The rest of this chapter explores two key aspects of accessibility. First, it covers the legal requirements for corporations and web developers. This varies from country to country and occasionally changes, but we’ll do our best to navigate those thorny paths. Second, it covers what you can do—today—to apply unobtrusive accessibility tactics to your site without disrupting the design or architecture. Even the smallest improvements in the markup can have tremendous benefits to a significant number of users, and we’ll cover the critical basics before establishing a roadmap for future learning.   Read more

It is probably true that the majority of a corporation’s website visitors will have passable vision, no significant learning disabilities, and not suffer from epilepsy. It’s even common for businesses to think people with those inhibitions will never visit their site because “that’s not our target audience.” But remember that a target audience is not the only audience, and disabilities are more common than most believe (remember, about 32 million in the United States alone). Beyond designing for that significant slice of the population, there are many reasons to consider accessibility in a corporate web project.   Read more

While the design industry is slowly becoming more educated through the evangelism of Joe Clark1 and sites like Ian Lloyd’s Accessify,2 many web designers still incorrectly equate “disabled” with “blind.” While it is true that the Web plays host to a significant number of people with visual impairments, to slice the definition of disability so narrow is a disservice to the millions of users with other handicaps.   Read more