It's probably good that you pointed that out Steve. I've never been a
graphic designer but I've done a lot of websites in my time. One of my 'big
beefs' with a lot of websites is that they make no effort whatsoever to be
usable with simpler browser technologies.
In a few cases I've sat down with someone and fired up lynx (or links) to
show someone what a blind person probably 'sees' on their site and more
importantly to them (usually and unfortunately) what Google will see when
they try to index their site. That is REALLLY entertaining when it is an
all-flash site which neither lynx or Google can read :)
I've always suspected that sites that relied too heavily on JavaScript don't
work well or at all for people that are blind. My non-scientific test for
most sites is to try to buy their product or get a critical piece of
information using only a text based browser like lynx or links. MANY times
it is that dumb piece of 'on click' code that is doing input validation that
is the gatekeeper prevented me from completing the sale or from changing
from one page to another. I haven't tried that on an ajax / 'web2.0' site
but suspect I'd be SOL trying to use them. How advanced are the screen
readers/etc now days?
The other thing I usually try to show people that rely ONLY
on JavaScript for input validation is that not only can I turn
off JavaScript but I can also circumvent their so called 'security' and put
complete garbage data in their database (or worse do sql injection) because
they chose to be a bit lazy about input validation and to not ALSO do input
validation on the server side. I usually only put in simple JavaScript such
as alert boxes and opt to do all of the important logic on the server side
where they'll have a harder time circumventing it. That said it has been
quite a while since I've built an entire site from scratch... I'm wondering
if I could buy one of my own products from my Joomla based shopping cart
using links!
JD
On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 00:37, Steve Holmes <
steve@holmesgrown.com> wrote:
> I appreciate your interest in looking to the community for ideas for
> development support. However I am concerned about what you are
> seeking in your web design goals. I as a blind person, take
> particular exception to things like heavy animation and eye candy!
> Frankly, eye candy most often flies in the face of accessibility; that
> is, the more eye candy, the more flash and the more animation someone
> throws at a website the far less easy it is for a blind person to even
> navigate around on such a site. Sory if I come off negative here but
> I think there should be a lot more to a good website than just
> artistic beauty or cuteness.
>
> In fact, I'm personally studying web development on my own time since
> my recent lay-off but it is all being done on a LAMP type setup -
> Linux Apache, MySQL (actually postgresql in my case) and php so I can
> eventually become marketable with these newer more modern skills.
>
> On Thu, Oct 07, 2010 at 02:23:58PM -0700, Ed Knapp wrote:
> >
> > Good afternoon, all!
> >
> > We are working on some new things at my company and we have come to the
> conclusion that we
> > need some help from a real web development company. We have a public
> facing web application
> > hosted on an IIS platform using ASP.NET, javascript and the like.
> >
> > We are looking for someone to help us build the View/Presentation
> portions of our MVC design model.
> > We can (and did for the last release) do a basic interface but we are
> looking to make the jump to
> > a very current front end with animations and some eye candy.
> >
> > I thought that I would ask here and support the local community and see
> if anyone can point me in a direction.
> > If you have worked with someone and enjoyed the experience, I would love
> to hear from you.
> > Please hit me off list for more details unless you think your reply would
> be particularly interesting
> > to the rest of the PLUG.
> >
> > Thanks very much!
> >
> > Ed Knapp
> > Peoria, AZ
> > list email: catbertek@hotmail.com
> > work email: gknapp@inilex.com
> >
> > either email address is fine.
> >
>
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