Text-only version of your site?

In the past, sites had no real structure and multimedia elements were used heavily without any thought of alternate content.

When these sites had to be made accessible the knee-jerk reaction was often to create a text-only version of the site. This allowed those unable to access the main site a means of reading the content, but at a cost.

Adding a text-only site in those days effectively doubled the web team's workload as it was a whole other site to maintain. Text-only sites contained content that was incomplete or of lower quality and over time gradually became more and more out of sync with the main site. An often used analogy, is the idea of having a restaurant where quality food is served upstairs and passable food is served on the ground floor in the kitchen. Diners unable to tackle the stairs are forced to have a lower quality experience. The dual-site approach ticked all the boxes for accessibility in theory, but in practice rarely offered value.

To counter these problems, text-only sites became dynamic and shared the databases that powered the live site. The main site would then link off to a 'text only' site (the same site, but using different HTML templates that removed all styling). This was an improvement, but it missed an important point.

Most screen-readers and assistive technologies work by screen scraping; reading all the visible text on the page. This happens regardless of whether the site is text-only or not. Although text-only sites can help users who have visual difficulties, a better approach would be to provide alternative colour schemes or advise and educate the user on how to create and apply user stylesheets.

To make sure that assitive technologies can make sense of your website, it is more important to structure your pages well. The templates supplied with your website will give you a good base structure to work from, but it's important that the copy you add through the CMS maintains the standard.

Good structuring tips include using heading elements rather than simply making text bold (and bigger!) to both clarify what the following section is about and to create a heirarchy (e.g. h3 is considered a sub-section of h2). Additionally, when creating links to other pages it's good practice to ensure that the linking text makes sense when read out of context - try to resist typing 'click here'!

By taking accessibility into account at the start of a project and making it a part of the project instead of a bolt-on as in the past, your site will be more accessible with less effort. With a little care, keeping your site maintained and accessible to all can be a piece of cake. Stop trying to be accessible and start being accessible!

By Andrew Donaldson
Published: 7 November 2007
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Introduction to Microformats

As web standards start to become, well, the web standard, we can start to use some of the power that this structured approach to web development affords us. Microformats, that is, standardised chunks of web pages that represent data, will allow machines to not only read our published data, but to understand it.

As an example, hCard is one of the more established microformats. The hCard is used to represent people or organisations and can be used in situations where you would traditionally offer a vCard file. As support for microformats in browsers grow, the browser would automatically detect the contact details and ask if you would like to add the contact to your address book. Taking it one step further, search engines could 'know' that your contact page contains information to contact you. The search engine then becomes a massive online public contacts database (Although in the future this could be abused to help find John Connor).

Likewise, selling online has a potentially interesting future under microformats. Rather than posting a classified advert on an online marketplace (such as eBay) simply add an advert to your own website. The next time the search engine spider visits your website, it understands the advert microformat that you are using to display your classified ad and uses the information accordingly. Your advert could then be added to a global (and local) searchable shop-window without any further effort on your behalf.

Microformats make your organisation's information more accessible to the Internet. Right now, the support isn't there, but it is coming. Both Microsoft and Mozilla are expected to support microformats with the next major version of their browser and who knows, desktop software (such as Outlook or Thunderbird) may follow. For those keen to have an early preview of microformats in action, Mozilla Labs released Operator, a Firefox extension to detect microformats as you browse.

With the momentum behind the microformats movement, understanding the concept and potential of microformats can only benefit those involved in the website procurement process.

By Andrew Donaldson
Published: 17 May 2007
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