Category: accessibility

Pop Menu Magic and Me

I run a site called MusicAustin. I redid it a few months ago with a CSS layout and a menu system from Project Seven called Pop Menu Magic. It’s a great menu and I really like the features. Take a quick side trip over to MusicAustin to see how it works if you aren’t familiar with Pop Menu Magic.

My traffic and my search engine results fell almost immediately, as you can see from the Webalizer stats in the screen capture below.

Webalizer stats for MusicAustin

It took me a while to notice the drop in traffic and the lousy search engine placement; then it took me a while longer to figure out why. Once I fixed it (in August) you can see that my traffic bounced right back up near its former level.

My problem was that I had some of the top level menu items with nothing but <a href="#"> in the anchor element. The search engines weren’t finding anything to follow. I’d broken the path to the secondary level list and the pages they referenced. The solution was to make sure that every link in the top level list actually went to a page, even if it was one of the pages mentioned in the subnav that popped out on hover.

You know, I’ll bet the supporting documentation for Pop Menu Magic mentions this. So my aplogies to everyone at Project Seven (I love you guys) if all I had to do was RTFM. But I have to learn everything the hard way, and this is just one more proof of that sad fact.

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Case Against Target Won’t Be Dismissed

This news release from the National Federation for the Blind NFB – Target Sept Release says that the case against Target, which Target had asked to be dismissed, will go on. I know a lot of you read with great interest Jim Thatcher’s Expert Declaration. It appears that a legal precedent on accessibility in commercial sites may actually become reality with this case.

Here’s what the NFB site says : “A federal district court judge ruled yesterday that a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind. The ruling was issued in a case brought by the National Federation of the Blind against Target Corp. (Northern District of California Case No. C 06-01802 MHP) The suit charges that Target’s website (Target) is inaccessible to the blind, and therefore violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. (ADA), the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the California Disabled Persons Act. Target asked the court to dismiss the action by arguing that no law requires Target to make its website accessible. The Court denied Target’s motion to dismiss and held that the federal and state civil rights laws do apply to a website such as target.com.”

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NCDAE Webcast on Open Source CMS

The National Center on Disability and Access to Education has this podcast NCDAE Webcast on Accessibility and the Open Source Content Management Movement. After you listen to the podcast, be sure to look at the factsheet on accessibility and CMS–it gives criteria for decision making and compares common commercial and open source choices.

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Web Accessibility Best Practices

A comprehensive and easy to use guide to best practices: Web Accessibility Best Practices. The overview states the purpose as, The primary purpose of these HTML/XHTML Best Practices is to improve the accessibility of web resources at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign for students, faculty, staff, and the general public. This work will be helpful to many more than just folks at UIUC.

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Jim Thatcher’s expert declaration about target.com

Don’t be scared off by the legal looking stuff in the top screen or two of Jim Thatcher’s expert declaration. This is fascinating reading, even though it is a legal document. Once you get into the actual declaration it’s easy reading, too.

Thatcher tells about his background and why he’s qualified as an expert in this case. Then he explains point by point why the target.com site fails to be accessible to a blind user. The site fails on many points that are easily fixed.

Any instructor teaching a class that explained best practices for accesssibility would explain to students how to avoid these failures as core knowledge for the course. To me, it ties in with my question from a couple of days ago: What’s the problem? Why didn’t Target find web builders who regarded accessibility features such as alt text and form labels as intrinsic to any design? A company shouldn’t have to be taken to court to be forced to provide such commonly acknowledged accessibility features. What’s the problem when a major retailer puts up a huge profit-making site intended for millions of shoppers and doesn’t develop the site using basic accessiblity standards? What bit of information is missing from the corporate decision maker’s site-launch-equation that would prevent such blatant mistakes from being made in the first place?

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What’s the problem?

I mentioned a few weeks back that I’m writing a new book. A feature of each chapter is a real world example that demonstrates some aspect of the chapter using valid HTML, valid CSS, and accessible design. In other works, a standards-based site.

I search for the real world examples using the sites that purport to catalog good CSS design examples, but when you run the basic validation tools on these examples, they don’t measure up. If you want a truly good standards-based design you have to go to a designer’s site, not to a regular, run-of-the-mill commercial site that would be visited by normal people who are not web designers. What’s holding back the everyday working business sites? Is it too hard, too steep a learning curve, too much browser incompatibility? After all these years, shouldn’t more average Jane or average Joe web production people be capable of using standards? Surely it isn’t only the 0.01% of the population who are standardistas who attempt to do good work with standards-based design.

Make my day. Tell me about a good example. I’d love to be proven a liar about the lack of good examples.

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WCAG 2.0 still getting plenty of criticism

Complaints about WCAG 2.0 continue to fill the blogosphere. Joe Clark’s position is clear and strong at Whither WAI and WCAG? Le blog personnel de Joe Clark. There are others joining the chorus, but you can get the main points from Joe Clark’s articles. A very complete set of references to articles about WCAG 2.0 can be found at the Web Design Reference site.

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