Aggregator of RSS feeds concerning web accessibility

Common knowledge to most who have been working with CSS for a few years, but perhaps not something that relative newcomers have come across yet: the order in which you define the different link states affects the end result.

I prefer the following order: :link, :visited, :hover, :focus, :active.

Eric Meyer explains why the order matters and why he also prefers defining the states in this order in Link Specificity, Ordering the Link States, and Who Ordered the Link States?.

Posted in CSS.

One large group of people with special needs that is often overlooked – even by those who make an effort to build accessible websites – is dyslexics.

A good way to learn more about dyslexia, how it can make it hard to use the web, and what you as a designer can do about it is to read Mel Pedley’s article series on designing for dyslexics:

• Designing for Dyslexics: Part 1 of 3
• Designing for Dyslexics: Part 2 of 3
• Designing for Dyslexics: Part 3 of 3

You will also find some useful tips in a presentation by Jonathan Hassell on Dyslexia that was held at the Scripting Enabled conference in London in September.

Posted in Accessibility.

Jeffrey Zeldman recently posted Is your (website’s) underwear showing?, which is a reminder about one of my pet peeves – websites that don’t specify a background colour but have a design that relies on all browsers having a white background. When the browser background is set to something other than white, some sites look really… interesting :-).

This has been happening since forever. Back in the late 1990’s those of us who used Netscape on Macs saw a lot of it since Netscape on the Mac had a grey default background colour while Windows browsers used white. And back then “nobody” checked their sites on a Mac.

In case you don’t feel like changing the default background colour of your web browser but still want to see how strange sites can look, check out the Flickr pool Underwear showing (web design).

The solution to this is very simple: if your site is meant to have a white background, specify a white background in the CSS. It will cost you at the most 23 characters:

1. body {background:#fff;}

Better yet, make sure the CSS you use as a starting point for new projects specifies a colour for both text and background. That way you’ll never forget to do it.

Posted in Accessibility, Graphic Design, Usability.