Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] firefox, web accessability, and the programto make it all better

[Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

>And, my word, Firefox is significantly faster than Safari at rendering
>most sites (which did not used to be true) and especially fast at
>rendering/downloading gmail.  So I should be incredibly happy.
>  
>
They've really been kicking butt with Firefox. It's a lot faster and 
polished than it was and IMO really feels like a professional product 
now. More so than any other browser I've ever tried.

>It turns out that several sites have text navbars that don't actually
>have text in them, using the oh-so-90s technique of a navbar gif and
>an image map.  This defeats type-ahead find in Firefox, pretty
>obviously, and is just a gratuitous accessability problem.  (You can't
>as easily navigate via the keyboard, and increasing the text size via
>cmd-+ doesn't make the navbar any more readable if you like or need
>big text.)
>  
>
This is one of the big things I fight with my clients over. They worry 
about what their site looks like more than how usable it is or how well 
it'll work with search engines.  Text as images drives me nuts as does 
the entire process of looking at websites from a graphic artist's point 
of view. I have to keep telling them that unless you have a website 
selling something related to art then having fancy graphics on your page 
really isn't going to keep customers. Of course you don't want to look 
like some schmuck made your page for Geocities but that itself means you 
don't want graphics that aren't useful filling up your site.

>So the question is: what should be done about this?
>
>  
>
I really hope one day stylesheets expand to where everyone can be happy. 
Let the user download the page as XML marked up data (not XHTML or 
similar) and use stylesheets to tell the browser how to do all the 
layout including generating fancy photoshop-like features. XSL is pretty 
flexible but it's a pain to work in for large projects.

>But, in general, does anybody know a nice and effective
>way to get people to change a less accessible site?
>  
>
Make a competing site that is better.

>I think that the best way might be just to give them the code to
>change things.  Once you've gotten some tweaks made, you can generate
>even a semi-custom nav bars using CSS and html pretty much
>programatically.  You could then tell people, "Hear, just paste these
>lines in place of what  you have" (or do the surgery for them) and
>they could see that it worked, looked good, degraded more nicely, and
>was just the Right thing to do.
>  
>
Unfortunately most web developers feel challenged if you just tell them 
how to fix their sites. You usually have to talk to their boss to get 
anything done. That means explaining, in terms of dollars, why making 
the changes will help them. Also I've found that a lot of websites are 
poorly constructed. To make a simple change like this they often have to 
go through lots of static html, code that generates dynamic html, etc. 
So it can be a real job to do even a simple change. It seems that the 
simple concept of templates is beyond many web developers.


-- 
Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>
http://kavlon.org

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