Posts About Accessibility

Accessible links in printer style sheets

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Using some CSS voodoo, you can display a text link’s URL in parenthesis after the link text. This would be very useful for printer style sheets, where you can’t see where the links are pointing when the page is printed out.

Read on for more details and the code.

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How SEO improves web accessibility

Tuesday, August 21st, 2007

Good search marketers are starting to make a positive impact on web accessibility. Many search marketers say that Google is the ultimate blind user anyway. Most everywhere, web accessibility still remains low on the totem pole of priorities. Let’s dive deep into the realms of user experience and talk about how good SEO can improve [...]

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Blog Series: Why Search is a user experience issue

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

Many think of Search Engine Optimization as wizardry to get high rankings in search engines. It is true that high rankings are one measurement of success. But there are elements of SEO that helps improve your site’s user experience. Let’s see SEO helps out with other areas of user experience. Technorati Tags: seo, search marketing, [...]

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Face it: you need bigger font

Monday, June 11th, 2007

Like it or not, a lot of your sites’ visitors wish that you would increase the default font size on your site. Finally, technology is starting to facilitate this, but why is no one willing to change along with it? Technorati Tags: design, font, web design, web, css, accessibility, usability, html

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Authoring accessible Web forms

Thursday, September 7th, 2006

As I’ve gotten better with XHTML and CSS, I’ve become more interested in figuring out which tag to use for each element on a web page. HTML tags were designed to describe information, not necessarily to dictate how to display information. We developers should ask ourselves which tags we should use on our HTML forms. [...]

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Don’t use the words “click here” or “more” as link texts

Monday, March 6th, 2006

Jakob Nielson reminds us of why link texts that say “click here” or “more” are horrible usability mistakes in his latest alertbox column.

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ColdFusion on Mac isn’t easy

Monday, November 21st, 2005

Learning how to be a ColdFusion developer on a Mac has had a higher cost to entry than I anticipated. My Dell laptop stopped powering up a couple weeks ago, so I decided to spring for an iBook. Some of the small things I’ve taken for granted have become compromised in this transition from Windows [...]

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Advice that your boss can’t argue against (when taken in moderation)

Tuesday, September 13th, 2005

Man, I couldn’t have said this better: . . . if you don’t have the time to do it right, there’s no way in the world you’ll find the time to do it over. Ever since I read this statement in Seth Godin’s blog, I’ve been trying to remind myself of it whenever the project [...]

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Free XML weather feed from the National Weather Service

Sunday, August 21st, 2005

Here is a fine example of the government putting forth an effort to present its electronic data to citizens in as many formats as possible. The National Weather Service now offers weather forecast information as a free SOAP-based Web service. I believe it is the government’s responsibility to inform citizens the best they can, so [...]

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Screen readers 101

Friday, July 8th, 2005

I came across an interesting Shockwave simulation that shows you how frustrating it is to browse most of today’s Web sites using a screen reader. Go there and try completing some of the tasks they have listed on the lefthand side of the screen: Fake Web site for University of the Antarctic (Shockwave plug-in required)

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