Joe Dolson: Accessible Web Design

This is cool. Basically, this is a tool which studies the tag structure of your site and communicates it as a color-coded series of interconnected tags. Although this has little to do with web accessibility, it is an interesting way to visually communicate generalities about the structure of a website.

If you read the original post by Aharef (get the funny joke in his handle?), you’ll get the opportunity to look at a variety of interesting graphs of major sites: BoingBoing, Yahoo, Google, and so on.

Although part of what I like about this is the elegance of watching the tool gradually display the structure of your page, I also find that it provides an interesting view into the overall style of building a page. A very focused site, such as BoingBoing, has a very straightforward graph. A vast density of links, but little else. The sprawling monster which is Yahoo.com provides an equally sprawling graph.

Here’s Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design:

Here, you can see this site in all it’s glory: sparing of <div> tags (green), the site predominantly consists of blue and gray tags: links and “other” tags. The “other” category includes <p>, so that’s probably the majority of what you see there. I feel pretty good about this graph: it’s straightforward and simple.

Still, the tool could be made even better: I’d love to be able to produce graphs where I chose the color coding pattern for particular tags. I could set all non-semantic tags to be bright red, to easily spot the condition of a site in that respect. I could focus my attentions on inline versus block elements, or I could differentiate between different levels of headings.

Or, of course, I could look with an eye to the prettiest graph I could come up with for my site.

One chronic problem in writing web development articles is keeping your writing readable. The world of web design, programming, and web accessibility is loaded with industry terminology which are undoubtedly not immediately obvious in meaning to someone who’s just begun researching the subject.

However, neither the option of excluding all industry terminology from an article nor the option of including a definition inline for every term is really palatable for me. With the first option, the article becomes simplified to a point of abstraction, and is less useful for the practically-minded designer trying to get a firmer grasp of the subject. Inline definitions, however, can easily interrupt the flow of the text, rendering the overall readability lower because of the extraneous information.

The fact is, a constant barrage of definitions is not the right choice for every audience; and neither is the assumption of too much or too little knowledge.

What I’ve done to attempt to tackle this sticky problem is begin work on a glossary of web accessibility terminology.
I will gradually be adding contextual links to these terms in articles where I deem it necessary or useful. Those who need the definition can follow the link, those who don’t won’t need to. I’ll also be implementing an alternate look for links to these definitions, to attempt to make it clear that these links are different from the normal, run-of-the-mill outbound links.

Why write my own definitions? So I can have continuous control over the definition of a term, and so I’m not dependent on some other authority site remaining authoritative or, for that matter, failing to include all the terms I may want to refer to.

The glossary has a long way to go - only 26 terms so far, but I’ll keep plugging away as time allows. Feel free to suggest terms I may want to define, as well…

For the last two weeks I’ve been living an unusually isolated life. Specifically, one without a home internet connection.

Now that you’ve all finished gasping with shock, I’ll continue.

During this time, I’ve learned a lot about how much my normal life style (not just my work, which is naturally web based) is set around internet access. I retrieve almost all the information I normally need during the day through the internet. Restaurant menus, opening and closing times, phone numbers - all retrieved through internet search. If I have curiousity which I simply must satisfy, I’ll query Wikipedia.

But recently I’ve had to survive without that kind of access. I can still go off to cafes and restaurants and access free wireless service with some regularity, thankfully. This makes it at least possible for me to continue with my work. But it’s a lot more awkward.

At any rate, enough whining. Back to the topic at hand.

During this last few days, I’ve worked my through the code I use for a search engine with most of my PHP/MySQL web sites. I’ve documented it moderately thoroughly and written it up. However, lacking internet access, I haven’t really tested this version of it. Hopefully, there are no major mistakes!

If anybody happens to give it their time to look at, I hope you’ll drop me a line and let me know your thoughts. I’m particularly interested in hearing about anybody’s views about improving the security of the script, but will gladly accept comments on usability, functionality, etc.

 Tags:

• search
• PHP
• mysql

In the last couple of days I’ve written a short tutorial on how to make and edit posts using the Blogger.com blogging service. I’ve found myself setting up blogs for people more and more often lately, but sometimes they need help using the service. These instructions, hopefully, will give my clients some introductory guidelines for using the service! Anybody else who has or wants a blog, of course, is free to use them as well. I don’t go into the details of setting up the blog initially, but you can always contact me for assistance with that.

Setting up a blog through Blogger is one of the cheapest services I provide - if you want nothing more than a basic template as provided by Blogger, I’ll do the set up for you for a very reasonable cost. For original designs and other more extensive needs, obviously, the price increases.