Helpful Design Goes Live
It's been a busy week getting the Helpful Design website up and running, and now it is!
GO VISIT NOW!
It's been quite a learning experience. I've been doing websites for over 10 years now, and the way the web is being used has changed a lot. For example, the code used to write webpages, although largely similar to 10 years ago, is undergoing a very slow change from a slightly inconsistent HTML to a well-formed XHTML. This is good in many ways. Firstly XML is well formed, which means all the tags that make up the code have to be symmetrical - an open and a close! The code that makes up the webpage is consistent, which means easier maintainence, easier to check for standards compliance and various other stuff. XHTML can be generated from munging of basic XML documents (documents containing definitions of stuff) using XML Stylesheets (XSL). These explain how to convert one XML document into another (such as an XHTML document). This is good because it means content can be generated automatically.
However, one of the main things that it helps towards is the separation of content from style. This is a big issue in the world of hypertext documents at the moment, particularly with the, albeit slow, growth of the Semantic Web, which aims to make data separate from content -- first you need the content separate from the style. This is done these days using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). There are many advantages of having your content separate from your style. One of these, as I've explained before is accessibility. By making your content separate from the graphics and funky colours that make your website look so nice, you're able to deliver this content in different ways - for example in great big text for people who can't see very well, or through a speech engine for people who can't see at all.
There's more to making accessible websites than just writing XHTML and CSS. Making sure there's links to jump to sections; making sure the structure gives people with learning difficulties all the help they might need; making sure the contrast and size of the text can be changed, etc. And that's the bit that takes the time, and what makes it so difficult.
That's why so many sites just don't bother. For example, I was surfing about after watching something about Riverdance on TV last night and came across Jean Butler's website at www.jeanbutler.com. It doesn't work in my Firefox due to some problem with the flash plugin, so, like so many other pages, I just get a blank screen. Admittedly they provide a butt ugly text only version, but that's just not good enough, really, and instantly doubles the maintenance costs.
Later I ended up on the designer of a lawyer's website (website design by www.freecom.net) and looked at a few of their websites they "designed". [I used the quotes on purpose there because they've really just filled in a template - which they admit to doing, at least]. These really do fall short on accessibility. Check out this one which looks nice enough on a modern browser, but turn off image support and it looks like this:
Now try and navigate around. I know I couldn't, and nor could any blind person.
I've found some great sites in all this flailing around. The Accessify Forums are a great place to see some scathing reviews of some websites. There's lots of validators around, although Cynthia seems the best accessibility tester.
Anyway, I've lost the plot with this post now...
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