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91福利社 standards for all
- 13 Jul 07, 02:03 PM
Make yourself comfortable, pull your teddy bear close and hang on tight. We鈥檙e off on a scary ride through how the 91福利社 applies accessibility standards to their websites.
The , more commonly known as W3C, has established web standards. The W3C is a collaboration of the great and the good of the international web community. The standards they have created are generally considered to enshrine best practice for building an accessible website.
So why do the 91福利社 make a point of following these standards? I spoke to Nick Holmes, Team Leader of Client Side Development Team, and 鈥淢r Standards鈥 at the 91福利社, who told me there were a number of good reasons to follow standards.
Firstly, making the 91福利社 websites accessible to all is the right thing to do. Nick says that, 鈥淎ll site owners have a responsibility to make their websites accessible to all, but this is especially true at the 91福利社 when we must look after all license fee payers. It is one of the main reasons I work here.鈥 It is a sentiment you hear a lot, whoever you talk to at the 91福利社.
Nick also added that an accessible website can improve usability for everyone, whether they have a formal disability or not. Reading from a monitor is harder on the eyes than reading from print. At the end of a long day, a lot of users can appreciate being able to increase font size on a web page, and give their eyes a bit of a rest.
So how is the 91福利社 handling the web 2.0 accessibility bogey man, AJAX?
AJAX is a way of scripting so that what is displayed on a page can be changed without re-loading it in the browser. Which is a bit abstract. Take a look at this 91福利社 Technology story about the . On the right hand side you will find the 鈥榤ost popular stories now鈥 feature, where you can see a list of the 鈥榤ost read鈥 or 鈥榤ost emailed鈥 stories. The feature depends on AJAX to switch between each list, displaying it on the same place on the page. It is easy to see how it works if you are sighted 鈥 but when using a screen reader, you don鈥檛 get the visual cue and can miss that the content has changed.
So we know the 91福利社 uses AJAX. How do they make it accessible to all? 鈥淚t is a technique known as 鈥榩rogressive enhancement鈥欌, says Nick. He went on to explain, 鈥淏asically, we make sure all content is accessible. If we want to jazz things up to look prettier, using AJAX to do it, we can 鈥 so long as it does not limit anyone鈥檚 ability to read the content. With a screen reader, the user will get the 鈥榤ost read and 鈥榤ost emailed鈥 lists one after another.鈥
So there you have it. Whilst the 91福利社 continually look at ways to improve their websites, providing more features and improving usability, none of this is done at the expense of accessibility.
The 91福利社 is not responsible for the content of external internet sites
颁辞尘尘别苍迟蝉听听 Post your comment
Are you planning on addressing the fact that many of the your websites, and some of your core templates, use tables for layout? I know that historically it was to ensure compatibility with older browsers, but surely nowadays accessibility is more important?
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Hi Paul,
Ajax is specifically about using scripts to send data to, or grab data from the server, not (as you've asserted) doing user interfaces like the "most read"/"most emailed" lists.
Javascript (of which Ajax is a subset) is used to created the tabbed interface for swapping between the lists but, if you have Javascript disabled, you are presented with both lists. This is the right way to write Javascript, the progressive enhancement that you mention in your post.
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Frankie,
Yes, I agree 100%, in fact our standards say that this is no longer allowed.
In the accessibility standards - 12.2. You MUST use style sheets to control layout and presentation.
As I hope you can appreciate it takes some time to turn round a site the size of the 91福利社, but the 91福利社 homepage (the UK version) is an indication of where we are going with this.
This also doesn't mean that we drop access to content in older browser, simply that in those cases we drop styling and the javascript interaction layer. This still allows users access to our content - see browser standard, javascript and css standard for more.
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Dear Tim,
You're absolutely right, that isn't AJAX in its strict sense, but often items like this get labelled as such for easy of feature explaination.
AJAX strictly is defined as using XML as the trasferred file also, and in the 91福利社 we often use JSON instead.
Either way a good example of 91福利社 AJAX using is the '91福利社 Food Recipe finder', where this ansychronous javascript interaction with a JSON response is built in a prgressive enhancement model of 'you still get all the content you just dont get the enhanced search refinement mechanism if you don't have javascript'.
Hope this is a better example. I think it highlights how AJAX can be used to aid accessibility and usability for some, and yet is built in a fashion that does not dammage the experience or deliver less content for others.
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