Free! - How disabled users access the Internet

In 1995 a new era of accessibility for disabled people began. The DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) was passed, stating that:

“It's unlawful for a service provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide any service which it provides to members of the public.”

A website is regarded as a service and the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) and DRC (Disability Rights Commission) have been quick to apply pressure on to organisations to push this law into practice. Indeed, the DRC has now published a report on its formal investigation into 1000 websites.

So, how do disabled people access the Internet?

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Design-Wise Shopping Carts

One easy way to develop an eye-pleasing and functional site is through a grid layout, because as Web designers switch from tables to CSS rules, grids remain an important tool to use for layout considerations. When a simple grid is applied to some examples that I used in the last article about shopping cart programs, some sites seem soundly designed, and others seem to fall a little short of the grid design mark. Further, even though a site might carry a great design, other details may make the shopping experience rather shabby...

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Free! - ten ways to improve the usability of your ecommerce site

More and more money is being spent online as consumers switch to shopping on the web. Yet so many websites don't seem to have considered the usability of their ecommerce site and of their ordering process, resulting in users prematurely giving up and abandoning their shopping basket. Here are ten ways to improve the usability of your ecommerce site, so that you can maximise your conversion rate and help convert the contents of users' shopping baskets into orders:

1. Identify users with their e-mail address

How many different usernames do you use for ecommerce website accounts? Now, how many different e-mail addresses do you use for ecommerce website accounts? I'd wager that you not only have fewer e-mail addresses, but also that you find it much easier to remember your e-mail address, than your username.

Always try and use an e-mail address to identify users, rather than a username. This is because e-mail addresses are easier to remember and are more standard, meaning that you don't have to worry so much about special characters. They're also always unique, so you can avoid the problem of another user having already taken a username.

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Free! - How to find good keywords

Good keywords are frequently searched for (high demand) but not being targeted by many other websites (low competition). There are a number of tools out there that can help you find them.

Wordtracker

The best tool out there, Wordtracker is one of the most essential SEO tools. To use Wordtracker:

• Go to the Wordtracker website and pay £7 for 24 hours’ access
• Enter a keyword phrase you're thinking about targeting
• Wordtracker will suggest hundreds of related phrases - click on the ones you like
• Once you've clicked on all the phrases you like, run them through the program
• Wordtracker will compile a score for each phrase, based on the number of users searching for it and the number of websites targeting it
• The higher the score, the better the keyword phrase!

Wordtracker also offers a free service which works in the same way but only uses results generated from Altavista.

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Free! - Benefits of an accessible website - part 2: The business case

The DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) states that service providers must not discriminate against disabled people. A website is regarded as a service and therefore falls under this law, and as such must be made accessible to everyone.

Some organisations are making accessibility improvements to their websites, but many are seemingly not making the accessibility adjustments. Disabled people don't access their website, they say, so why should they care?

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Free! Benefits of an accessible website - part 1: Increase in reach

The DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) states that service providers must not discriminate against disabled people. A website is regarded as a service and therefore falls under this law, and as such must be made accessible to everyone.

Some organisations are making accessibility improvements to their websites, but many are seemingly not making the accessibility adjustments. Disabled people don't access their website, they say, so why should they care?

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K.I.S.S. Accessibility and Design Issues

How much movement – or confinement for that matter – do you need on your Web site to capture a viewer’s attention? Do you really want to build in <target=”blank”>, add animations that slow down the presentation, or confine your pages to a static frameset? While all these tricks and more are available to the Web designer, what criteria can the designer use to just say “no” to these gimmicks? Further, how does a Web designer convince a client that he really doesn’t want that moving water applet? This week, I’ll share a few reasons why designers might cease these activities. Accordingly, you can use these reasons to help your client understand “understated” and “accessible.”

Web Designer as Accessibility Thief

My mother actually told me when I was a mere pup that I shouldn’t complain about my trek to the bus stop, because she had to walk two miles to school each day up and down a hill. I’ve seen that hill, and it’s nasty. Although her reprimand has become a cliché, it returned to haunt me this morning as I sat to write this article. I can picture it now…In about five to ten years I’ll respond to my grandchild’s complaint about his quark-second delay in download time: “Listen, sonny, I remember when I had to deal with pop-up windows, moving water applets, and frames in the hands of inexperienced Web designers. Get over it.”

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Free! - Why a CSS website layout will make you money

Although CSS layouts have been around for years, they haven't become so commonplace until recently. This was basically due to limited browser support (especially from Netscape 4) - nowadays though, CSS 2.0 (which introduced positioning) is compatible with over 99% of browsers out there (check out the browser stats over at The Counter).

So, why should you convert your website from its current table-based layout to a CSS layout? It'll make you money. Simple really. And here's four reasons to explain why:

 

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Free! - 9 Things that could improve your webpage today

Here are a few snappy suggestions for things you could do to improve your sites, enjoy!

 

 

1. More Speed!

Even in the world of Broadband connections, one of the top complaints by users is that a site is unresponsive and slow. Sometimes this is because of actual slow loading due to download time. In which case some careful image optimisation is and reducing the size of the page getting rid of extraneous tags is a good start. CSS for layout can aid you here as it'll remove lots of those repetitive font tags that are clogging your markup.

Sometimes page speed is due to the time taken for the browser to “draw” the page, rendering time. In this case you can improve it by getting rid of tables from the layout (due to how browsers render tables, lots nested of tables="slow" drawing of the page)

Another part of perceived speed relates to how quickly the user can actually find what they're looking for. So making sure your navigation is clear and unambiguous is a big plus here too. Otherwise the user ends up wasting their time and leaving in disgust.

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Free! - The secret benefit of accessibility part 2: A higher search engine ranking

An additional benefit of website accessibility is an improved performance in search engines. The more accessible it is to search engines, the more accurately they can predict what the site's about, and the higher your site will appear in the rankings.

Not all of the accessibility guidelines will help with your search engine rankings, but there are certainly numerous areas of overlap:

1. ALT descriptions assigned to images

Screen readers, used by many visually impaired web users to surf the web, can't understand images. As such, to ensure accessibility an alternative description needs to be assigned to every image and the screen reader will read out this alternative, or ALT, description.

<img src="filename.gif" alt="image description goes here" />

Like screen readers, search engines can't understand images either and won't take any meaning from them. Many search engines can now index ALT text though, so by assigning ALT text search engines will be able to understand all your images.

 

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Blog Development Possibilities for the Web Designer

We can’t avoid it. We can’t get around it, either, because it hits us in the face whenever we surf the Web. It’s fairly recognizable because its design may lack “umph,” spirit, and spunk (Did someone say it looks “mass-produced”?).  On the other hand, it may appear so sharp that it seems to defy the pundits who declare that the Web is no place for the likes of magazine design. IT is the Weblog, or BLOG. In some cases, it’s a personal soblog, a collaborative moblog, a Billy Joe Boblog, and even a joblog. Where does the Web designer fit into this self-designed madhouse? This week I’ll take you on a tour to discover how this Web tool works for and against professional Web designers.

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Free! - Ten usability blunders of the big players

Web usability is about making your website in such a way that your site users can find what they're looking for quickly and efficiently.

With web usability practices becoming more commonplace, and knowledge of the many web usability benefits becoming more widespread, the big players on the web must surely have usable websites, right? Let's find out...

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