W3 org Accessibility

[Ingo Griegert]

I am quite interested to hear how other people go about following W3 Org
Accessibility issues.

I myself have learned HTML years ago and have so far stuck to what I have
learnt. I have to admit I never bothered that much with keeping up-to-date
with the current W3 recommendations. Fair enough, I used css to format
fonts, but I tried to stay away from using stylesheets for positioning
content and graphics as much as possible, simple for the reason that I
wanted older browsers to be able to display my pages as well as possible.

Now I finally brought myself to having a look into the Accessibility
recommendations and had to realise that I am not supposed to use tables for
the graphical layout of my pages anymore. Instead, the recommendation says
to use stylsheets for all the graphical layout, if possible:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CORE-TECHS/#structure

So how about you guys - do you stick to these recommendations? Do you find
it easy to create your layouts using positioning with css? I have used a few
layers for dropdowns, etc, but I have never tried to create a layout with
css that fills the entire screen. I have got the feeling that there were
issues in some browsers (eg on the Mac) that layers cannot be positioned
relative to the right side of the screen. I can do that with tables, so why
use styles instead?

Also: use text equivalent for every non-text element.
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html#tech-text-equivalent
Well, I have used alt so far for images that had a major importance in
understanding or navigating the website. Let's say every button in a
navigation bar had an alt value. But do we really have to go that far and
give every single Spacer-image a text description? For people who have
turned off their images or cannot view them on their browsers, I think it
would be more confusing seeing all those descriptions that are completely
irrelevant, than having only the few descriptions that are of importance.

Wow, long post, but this is how it hit me when I read on the recommendations
today. Would be good to hear your 10 cents.

 

[Leif K-Brooks]

So how about you guys - do you stick to these recommendations? Do you find
it easy to create your layouts using positioning with css?
Yes.

I have used a few
layers for dropdowns, etc,
http://dorward.me.uk/www/layers/

but I have never tried to create a layout with
css that fills the entire screen. I have got the feeling that there were
issues in some browsers (eg on the Mac) that layers cannot be positioned
relative to the right side of the screen. I can do that with tables, so why
use styles instead?
Accessibility.

Also: use text equivalent for every non-text element.
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html#tech-text-equivalent
Well, I have used alt so far for images that had a major importance in
understanding or navigating the website. Let's say every button in a
navigation bar had an alt value. But do we really have to go that far and
give every single Spacer-image a text description?

No, because you shouldn't have spacer images.

For people who have
turned off their images or cannot view them on their browsers, I think it
would be more confusing seeing all those descriptions that are completely
irrelevant, than having only the few descriptions that are of importance.

If you use images correctly, alt text will be important.

 

[Ingo Griegert]

Accessibility.

Important, I agree. But even accessible pages should look good in general
browsers. Do you know whether the issue of positioning elements relative to
the right screen has been solved?

 

[Leif K-Brooks]

Important, I agree. But even accessible pages should look good in general
browsers. Do you know whether the issue of positioning elements relative to
the right screen has been solved?

Older versions of browsers are never "solved", so no.

 

[Ingo Griegert]

Older versions of browsers are never "solved", so no.

Let's say: do the latest versions of IE, Netscape (and Safari) on Mac and PC
all support above mentioned positioning?

 

[Leif K-Brooks]

Let's say: do the latest versions of IE, Netscape (and Safari) on Mac and PC
all support above mentioned positioning?

AFAIK, yes.

 

[TheKeith]

I am quite interested to hear how other people go about following W3 Org
Accessibility issues.

I myself have learned HTML years ago and have so far stuck to what I have
learnt. I have to admit I never bothered that much with keeping up-to-date
with the current W3 recommendations. Fair enough, I used css to format
fonts, but I tried to stay away from using stylesheets for positioning
content and graphics as much as possible, simple for the reason that I
wanted older browsers to be able to display my pages as well as possible.

Now I finally brought myself to having a look into the Accessibility
recommendations and had to realise that I am not supposed to use tables for
the graphical layout of my pages anymore. Instead, the recommendation says
to use stylsheets for all the graphical layout, if possible:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CORE-TECHS/#structure

So how about you guys - do you stick to these recommendations? Do you find
it easy to create your layouts using positioning with css?

I'm currently converting all of the pages in my site, to conform to the w3
specs, and I have to say that ultimately, styles offer more felxibility than
the old way. It's really a question of learning how to use them properly.
I'm havnig a rough time eliminating all of my tables as well, but with
styles like "float" and absolute positioning, you'll discover that you
really don't need the tables after all, and if eliminating them gets you the
w3c validation, it's all the more worth it. You'll have the upper hand in
the long run.


I have used a few

layers for dropdowns, etc, but I have never tried to create a layout with
css that fills the entire screen. I have got the feeling that there were
issues in some browsers (eg on the Mac) that layers cannot be positioned
relative to the right side of the screen. I can do that with tables, so why
use styles instead?

you can do it with styles. I actually learned this just yesterday. Let's say
you want to align and element to the right:
<div style="width:200px; height:200px; margin-left:auto">Content</div>
this will align it to the right of the page.

Also: use text equivalent for every non-text element.
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html#tech-text-equivalent
Well, I have used alt so far for images that had a major importance in
understanding or navigating the website. Let's say every button in a
navigation bar had an alt value. But do we really have to go that far and
give every single Spacer-image a text description? For people who have
turned off their images or cannot view them on their browsers, I think it
would be more confusing seeing all those descriptions that are completely
irrelevant, than having only the few descriptions that are of importance.

for purely graphical elements in your site, you can just have alt="" -- you
can skip the text. If it's anything important though, use alt text. As for
spacer gifs, they're not needed if you learn how to use styles well enough.
There are all kinds of ways of producing space where you need it: margins,
padding, etc.

Do it with styles--you're conforming to a standard and at the same time,
saving yourself all kinds of unnecessary markup by not worrying about the
various browser "quirks."

 

[Ingo Griegert]

Thanks for the input, Keith! That should get me going.

 

[David Dorward]

Let's say: do the latest versions of IE, Netscape (and Safari) on Mac and
PC all support above mentioned positioning?

Yes... as well as other CSS layout techniques.

 

[David Dorward]

Accessibility.

and easy of use
and bandwidth
and speed
and the ability to provide different layouts for different medias (e.g.
screen and print) without requiring the user to manually visit a different
page.

 

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

David Dorward pounced upon this pigeonhole and pronounced:

and easy of use
and bandwidth
and speed

Yes, yes, and yes.

and the ability to provide different layouts for different medias (e.g.
screen and print) without requiring the user to manually visit a different
page.

When I first found out I could alter the printed page with just a few
lines in a style sheet, I was ecstatic. With a proper design, there is no
reason to create a separate "printer friendly" page, for most normal
circumstances. Quite the bargain, actually.

 

[Chris Morris]

Let's say: do the latest versions of IE, Netscape (and Safari) on Mac and PC
all support above mentioned positioning?

I've managed to get decent positioning support out of
Mozilla 1+ (and Netscape 6, so Mozilla 0+, I suppose)
IE 5+ (though 5.0 needs more attention)
Opera 5+ (again, 6+ is better)
Konqueror 3+ (haven't got 2 to test with)

Everything else on my test boxes had acceptable fallback, usually with
better linearisation than if I'd used a tables layout.

 

[Eric Bohlman]

and easy of use
and bandwidth
and speed
and the ability to provide different layouts for different medias
(e.g. screen and print) without requiring the user to manually visit a
different page.

and the ability to alter your layout/presentation, even quite drastically,
for an entire site by making minor changes to a single file. This makes it
much easier to experiment with layouts, increasing the chances of coming up
with an optimal one (often you can't tell what the optimal layout should
look like until you've seen a few suboptimal ones; with "traditional"
table-and-spacer based layouts, by the time you've got a suboptimal layout
you've got so much work invested in it that there's a strong barrier to
change). And it makes it *much* easier to make changes to
layout/presentation based on customer requirements (such changes, of
course, always being requested at the very last minute).

and the ability to separate the tasks of content/structure creation and
layout/presentation creation, enabling you to do a better job on each of
them and, for a multi-developer site, enabling better delegation of tasks.
It also eliminates the tendency to force-fit the content/structure into a
prematurely-chosen layout; instead you'll wind up with a layout that fits
it naturally.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Now I finally brought myself to having a look into the
Accessibility recommendations and had to realise that I am not
supposed to use tables for the graphical layout of my pages
anymore.

That's not really among the most important principles. If you try to
check your page with a text-only browser, or in a 300 pixels wide
graphic window with font size set to 14pt, you will probably detect
more serious issues. The WAI guidelines don't favor tables for layout,
but they have rather mild critique on them _as such_. It all depends on
what you do with tables.

I have used a few layers for dropdowns, etc, but I have never tried
to create a layout with css that fills the entire screen.

Good for you. It would be foolish to use CSS just to repeat the old
mistakes.

Also: use text equivalent for every non-text element.

Isn't that pretty obvious?

But do we really have to go
that far and give every single Spacer-image a text description?

No. The key word is _alternative_. Not description. The W3C is confused
about this, but you need not be.

Wow, long post,

Well, tolerably long. But if you want help with a specific site with
some specific constructs and problems, you need to reveal the URL.