Hiring The Internet

What is website accessibility all about you ask? Simply put, it is constructing your site in such a way that visitors with disabilities can access your web content. What happens when someone using a screen reader encounters that mind blowing graphical banner that your designer created? Is there an awkward pause, or does your page handle the situation gracefully and keep the conversation going? The checklists below offer a set of standards and best practices that will put you well on your way to ensuring that your site’s content is available to as wide an audience as possible. As an added bonus, making your site accessible helps improve SEO as well as the experience of users with mobile devices.

Accessibility Checklists:

A Basic Checklist

W3C- An Authoritative List

Sec. 508 Checklist- It’s actually law in some cases

The w3c browser usage statistics from Jan. are in. No big changes from previous months, but look for IE6 usage to start shifting over to IE7 in the coming months as Microsoft is scheduled to start including upgrades to IE7 as part of their auto update on Feb.12.

Jan. 08 Browser Statistics:

When it comes to search engines, most of the time the question is “how do I make my site more visible?” Occasionally however the opposite need arises. Whether it be out of date content archived on the server, or new drafts that you’re not ready for the world to see, the question becomes “how do I keep search engines from indexing certain parts of my site?” Fortunately, there is an easy solution… use a robots.txt file. This text file, when placed in the root of your site, will tell search engines which pages or directories not to index.

It is important to note that although robots.txt will work for search engines that play by the rules, it is not fool proof. Nefarious robots, like those used for email address harvesting for example may ignore your robots.txt file. Furthermore, robots.txt does not actually hide pages, it just helps prevent them from being indexed. If you have sensitive information on your site that you don’t want anyone to see you’re better off keeping it offline, or implementing some form of password protection.

For technical specifics on creating and using a robots.txt file, visit http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

Here are some of the latest statistics from the W3C that should be taken into consideration when designing and building your next site.

Firefox continues it’s steady rise in popularity as IE6 slowly declines. Look for IE7 usage to continue to rise as more new computers are shipped with it pre-installed with Vista.

Browser Usage:
IE6 37.3%
Firefox 34.0%
IE7 19.7%
IE5 1.5%

Screen Resolution:
80% of viewers are using a screen size with 1024×768 resolution or higher. Good news for those who have been waiting patiently to break out of the constraints of skinny 800×600 layouts.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Ever wonder how the search engines “see” your site? There’s a quick way for all of you Firefox users to get a rough idea. Try disabling style sheets. View-> Page Style-> No Style
(Unfortunately IE doesn’t provide a similar easy means of disabling style sheets)

What do you see? Does your website still make sense? Is your company name and tag line still prominent and easy to spot, or is it now cloaked in 12pt Times anonymity like everything else on the page? Do you see a bunch of great looking images with elegant typography describing the products and services you’re trying to draw attention to? I hate to break it to you, but the search engines don’t.

SEO starts with good code. Make sure your programmer builds your pages using standards compliant, semantic markup. Semantic markup is essentially a fancy way of saying “use html’s built in heading code to indicate a heading, not the built in paragraph code”. It sounds like common sense (well, to us it does anyway) but you’d be surprised how often web designers get caught up in creating eye candy and overlook this essential best practice.

If you’re feeling brave and want to to know more about this stuff, be able to impress your Interneet marketing folk, and generally have a great handle on where your site needs to be to get results, take a look at these resources on semantic (and standards compliant) markup and SEO coding best practices:

http://www.456bereastreet.com/lab/developing_with_web_standards/full/
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/seo_and_your_web_site/