Archive for July, 2008

The Basics of Lists

29th July 2008 by sailor | 13 Comments

I have noticed that most bloggers use lists of some sort in their articles. Lists tend to give structure to the article, it nakes things look more ordered and of course it generally just makes things easier to read. I have however come upon some strange looking lists and often it is these non-standard lists that are the cause of web pages not validating. I would like to have a quick look at just how lists should be included in our markup.

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4 Do’s and a Don’t

27th July 2008 by sailor | 8 Comments

I received an EMail that really got me thinking. Are there any of the accessibility standards that are more important than others? Are there some of the checkpoints that should be implemented before any of the others? Amongst other things the mail read:

The standards are intimidating, they are difficult to read. Just what should be done first? Are some checkpoints more important than others?

Phew, this is like asking a father which of his children are his favorite.
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Providing Equivalent Alternatives

24th July 2008 by sailor | 3 Comments

The first of 14 guidelines in the WCAG Accessibility Standards tells us to provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content.

Today I would like to take a look just at providing equivalent alternatives to those graphics we all love using in our articles. We have two attributes in HTML that we can use to achieve compliance with the standards on this point, the alt and title attributes.
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Showing Content in WordPress

22nd July 2008 by sailor | 8 Comments

Some folks show the full contents of their articles on their main page. Others prefer to show just a short excerpt of the contents. Immaterial of your preferred method of doing things, WordPress offers you a few options.
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Just what are the accessibility standards?

21st July 2008 by sailor | No Comments

At first glance the accessibility standards can appear to be quite a daunting document.

To simplify matters I have listed the guidelines and checkpoints in an ordered manner. I have used color combinations to show which checkpoint belong to which priority. The purpose of this article is to serve as reference point for the rest of the content on the site. Hopefully it could also be used as a simplified list of all those checkpoints webmasters need to check their site against.
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Four Things

15th July 2008 by sailor | 8 Comments

I do not often publish social fun things on this site, I am normally too busy ranting about some or other accessibility issue. I do however enjoy digging around other blogs finding out whatever I can about the other bloggers whose sites I frequent. I suppose the old saying ‘what is good for the goose is good for the gander’ is true so I can break my own rules and do something just for the fun of it.

Colleen at Hot Dorkage tagged me with this meme, so here goes, four things in various categories I know about myself:
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Getting to the Crux of the Matter

15th July 2008 by sailor | 7 Comments

Most visitors scan, they do not read

Reader PeopleWhether we like to admit it or not, the visitors to our sites are not reading every word we dish up for them in our articles. Most of our visitors merely scan the pages picking out such certain words and sentences. This fact is often noticeable if one reads some of the comments left on articles. Lots of people have missed the point of the article and hence the slightly off-topic comments.

So if this is true it means that we should be making our articles more scanable. How can we go about this?
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Fixed Font Sizes Continued

12th July 2008 by sailor | 7 Comments

Today I would like to re-visit a topic that I have already touched on before. A topic that is actually aimed more at the web developers and not at the owners of sites. A topic that has been hotly debated on the Net many times before. A topic that in my opinion, has not been resolved as yet. Fixed font-sizes on any site can and do cause all sorts of problems.
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