20May
Accessibility is becoming a more important part of a web developer’s job. Yet accessibility is notoriously a hard thing to get right and it’s only getting harder.
If you’ve ever read the WCAG specification you would know that even for some of the most technically minded people the specifications are a difficult read. It’s not just the WCAG specification that suffers this way but the XHTML/HTML specifications read the same. Luckily for us there are online tools that mean we don’t have to read through hundreds of pages to know what we need to do to get everything right.
This isn’t true in the case of accessibility, unlike coding standards the accessibility guidelines cover both design and mark-up and online tools are only able to check mark-up. The tools do their best to advise on the areas that apply to design, or at least they did…
Continue reading “Where’s Bobby”
17May
Long form design is one of the most challenging aspects of my job, this is in part due to the restrictions of styling these elements, the most difficult being the select box.
This does not bother me so much as long as I am able to give balance to the form to make it usable and fit well within the design. This is not so easy as Internet Explorer does some odd things to Check boxes and Radio buttons.
Continue reading “IE breaks my radio”
14May
It is very important to present a design to a client in best way possible so that they can visualise how the design will translate to the end product. The design can only communicate so much to a client, it is difficult to easily incorporate a sites narrative and interactions into a design, and it’s is usually impractical to do so.
How it was
Since I started as a web developer I have simply supplied a client with a high quality JPEG image of their new website design, usually via email, to view on their PC or Mac. This appeared to work well enough, communicating such common elements as layout, fonts and colour. But is that enough? Is it possible to provide more information to a client in a design without jumping into the build phase?
Continue reading “Designing for Clients”
5May
Today the following post arrived in my RSS Inbox:
http://www.shauninman.com/archive/2008/05/05/css_qualified_selectors
Shaun Inman is a leading voice on the web, so when he talks about proposing new features to the CSS Working Group a lot of people will listen. His idea about the creation of CSS Qualified Selectors are well thought-out and his examples more than justify the proposals. Anything that reduces the number of unique ID’s and classes in HTML code can only help with building and maintaining websites.
It’s true that it will be a long time till we can take advantage of this, if the proposals are accepted. But in my view the idea would be a great addition to the CSS specification.