Accessibility & Compliance

In recent years the way web developers and designers build their website has changed drastically - this is to meet legality issues on accessibility for all, along with meeting the requirements for web pages to display on various platforms.

Being one of the original developers who used tables to position elements for a web page, it was yet another condition of change. But having swallowed the pill, it isn't all bad. Talking to fellow designers and viewing the guidelines offered by the web standards organisation itself, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) , it states tables should be used for tabular, financial-type data and not layout. For those who don't know, a better and more efficient way for positioning of graphics/elements on a page is firstly separating the content in one file with a main CSS file defining styles and the positioning for that page. It wasn't impossible to learn a new way, but it was a new way of thinking and a challenge.

Not only good for the disabled

Building compliant sites is good also for allowing search engines to register and rank your site easier. It also opens the chances of your site being compatible in other platforms and devices.

Read an article about the benefits for search engine recognition on a great CSS resource site ' A List Apart ' .

I'll do it my way !

Learning the new way has been a challenge but the applications developers use to build a site meeting various conditions is not, for me, in one package. My process of building a site requires the initial design phase (1) Fireworks and Photoshop for layout and design of the website. I then use (2) Dreamweaver to ' optimise ' and cut up the page up and positioning with the <DIV> tag and CSS. I then move it all over to (3) Visual Studio to create the master/template pages and do the necessary ASP.NET 2.0 coding and development work.

Separating content from code certainly brings less lines of code which betters web download speeds and search engine recognition, but on the other hand, making use of some of the new technologies in ASP.NET 2.0 renders more lines of code than wanted.

Check for yourself!

One of my objectives of re-developing this website is compliant to accessibility. To test for this there are various independent web services which checks pages for compliance, see below.

• CSS compliance :
  
• xHTML compliance :