In this issue

Accessibility

What is accessibility?

More and more clients are asking for sites to be accessible. Local and national government and charities in particular insist that this is a box to be ticked.    What is it and how do we make sure sites are accessible.

An accessible site is one that can be used by someone with a disability.  This may be anything from colour blindness or poor vision to a totally blind user.  There is not just one disability and not just one set of factors to be considered:

How does a disabled person use the web

A totally blind person will use a screen reader.  This is a device that reads the text on the screen and makes it available to the user via sound or brail.  The key issue here is that all the information should be available as text (not images) and should be in a logical order to a screen reader which will simply read the HTML file from start to finish in the order the material is in the file.

Someone with impaired vision will probably try and make the text bigger.  Browsers have the ability to do this provided you haven’t used fixed pixel sizes for your fonts. The worst case is that they can tell the browser to drop all styles and simply present everything in the browser's default font.

Someone with mild impairment or mild colour blindness may not even be aware that they have a problem (or may not want to admit it to themselves).  They just find some sites harder to read than others. 

Where do I start?

There are a number of standards and testing services you need to be aware of.  Here are a few good places to start.

1. The main standards-setting body for the web is the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and they have standards which are explained here.   They have defined three levels of adherence (levels 1 2 and 3).
   
2. RNIB ‘See it Right’   This also has a handy link to details about UK legal requirements.
   
3. Bobby is a very long-established tool for testing sites for accessibility. 
   
4. If you love Flash, then you should be aware of the Flash accessibility white paper.

What is the legal requirement?

Legally you should make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to your web site to ensure that it is accessible.  If you want to know what that means you had better consult a lawyer.  The RNIB web site has some information.

What is in these standards?

I am not going to go into the detail of the accessibility standards in this issue, but there are a few basics that most people know about such as always using ‘alt’ tags with images, so that someone who can’t see the image is made aware of what it contains.   

Also make sure there is enough colour contrast on the page to make text readable.  I spend a lot of time looking at designers' web sites, and folks I have to tell you that a lot of them have light grey text in a miniscule font on a darker grey background – or text that moves around while you are trying to read it.   I am sure that the young designer with 20/20 vision using a top of the range Mac screen can read it fine, but on a dodgy PC screen and imperfect vision these sites can be very challenging. 

The standards bodies are keen on using the HTML mark-up language as it was designed to be used, rather than as actually used in most sites today.  For example, tables should be used only for tabular information, list tags should be used for lists, heading tags for headings and so on.  Over the years, tables have been used for layouts, images used for spacing and to beautify lists, and so on.  This means using style sheets to lay out pages - which we discussed last month. 

Finally make sure that the order of the text on the page is logical to someone who can’t see your great layout.   This was difficult when tables were used to lay out pages, but is straightforward and natural if you are using style sheets.  

Is there a quick fix?

One option is a text-only version of the site, but this doesn’t help the marginally disabled users who may not want to use that facility.  With proper design this should not be necessary.

It also goes without saying that for new web sites this is not something that can be added once the site has been developed.  It is like putting up a shelf, then trying to straighten it later using a spirit level.  You will end up with bits of cardboard and matchsticks in an attempt to bodge the job.  I know whereof I speak on this one.

What next?

If you need to create an accessible web site, the place to start is the RNIB web site and the W3C web site.  The RNIB runs excellent courses, which are not expensive. 

We know of some people who are very experienced in this area. If you need a consultant, please give us a call and we will give you some contacts.

Business intelligence

A case study in Marketing Sherpa looked at email marketing in the UK.  There is some useful data about average opening rates (30%) click rates (10%) and so on.  UK email creative is reckoned to be more aggressive than the US, and UK marketers tend to rely on third-party agencies for creative development.  A big difference from the US apparently is that in the UK B-to-C market, evening emails to the home are preferred.  In fact consumers are more likely to respond to mails in the evening (45%) than in the afternoon (19%).  Spam filters are a big issue, but most UK email service providers have direct contact with ISPs. http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2912

The national email benchmarking study was published in January.  The results are not too surprising.  Most acquisition emails are sent weekly and most retention emails monthly.  The most popular (by far) email activity is product promotion and newsletters.   About half of respondents say that deliverability has remained the same in the last six months.  http://www.dma.org.uk/DocFrame/DocView.asp?id=1014&sec=-1

Technical tips - Controlling access by search engines.

 
Do you have part of your web site that you don’t want to be searched by search engines such as Google?  There are a few reasons:

1. You might have duplicate content, maybe it is formatted slightly differently for associates.  Google will only use one set of information that is duplicated and you want to control which one.
   
2. Multiple page impressions by a search engine could kill your server (it has happened to me).
   
3. Context – some parts of the site may not make sense if a user comes into it straight from a search engine.
   
4. You might not want a new site searched until you are ready.

The answer is the robots.txt file.  This file allows you to specify which parts of the site you do not want indexed by search engines.

The standard is very basic, you can only exclude whole directories.  But it is universally recognised.    

The alternative is the robots meta tag.  This will allow you to exclude robots on a page by page basis.  It is not universally recognised, but the main search engines obey it.  There are variants for specific search engines, such as the ‘googlebot’ tag.

More information here. http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html  and
http://www.google.com/bot.html#noindextags

News from the web

Our block of flats just got tagged by a local graffiti artist, and we are none too happy about it. Would we have been less or more happy if the graffiti included a hypertext link!  The graffiti artist can include a blue underlined (what else) word.  If the viewer sends an email or text message to www.gafedia.net with the word in it they get back information about the artist.  Great as long as the information includes where they live so we can send the boys in blue around.    

After many long years in which Internet Explorer is beginning to look rather long in the tooth, Microsoft are planning a new release.

A story not unrelated to … Firefox celebrates its 25millionth download.

TV over the Internet has always been a fairly poor thing.  If you want to watch a 2cm square picture you can just about manage it, but the bandwidth for full-size TV pictures is just not there.  TV over broadband is fine, but that is different, it is using all the bandwidth from the telephone company to the consumer. But once the global Internet gets in the way it has not been possible.  Now American telephone company SBC is planning new technology to allow Internet TV.  

Another Internet patent story (yawwnnn) but this time it is eBay that has been sued for patent infringement.  Can you really patent the idea of an auction? 

The futile court order by the EU, forcing Microsoft to sell a version of its operating system without Windows Media Player rolls on.   Will any manufacturer ship it with their PCs?  It seems unlikely as the version without WMP will be the same price. A few copies may sit on distributors’ shelves and the effect on competition in the EU will be negligible. 

E-Branding expert  and long-time friend of Textor, Mike Bayler  has joined the ranks of bloggers. 

Having spent billions for 3G licences it must be a downer for the networks to read that it's obsolete already.  A study predicts that wireless broadband will the the long-term winner for high speed mobile communication.