Kathleen's Spider Web
~~Kathleen
Anderson, Spider
Web Woman Designs
An Introduction to Bobby
and His Friends
**starred
red comments inserted by Linda**
Last
month, I wrote about Web Site accessibility and why you may be hearing so
much about it these days. Hopefully, you had a few minutes to visit some
web sites (maybe your own?) using the techniques we discussed and see how
accessible the sites are.
This
month, we are going to run Bobby
against the September
2001 issue of this newsletter, and see what Bobby has to say.
You can use this
link to see the results yourself.
Unfortunately,
this page does not yet meet the requirements for Bobby Approved status.
But it’s not going to take much to fix it!
**OK,
I'm ready!**
Under
the heading Priority 1 Accessibility, there are instances of images
with no alternative text. You
can use the link in the error message to read more about why this is a
problem. What Linda needs to do is for every instance in the page where
she uses an image; she needs to add the alt attribute to the img tag.
Bobby also tells her the line numbers where she needs to make the changes,
so it should be fairly easy to make the changes.
The
part that can be tricky, however, is to ensure that the alt text she adds
to the img tag is meaningful to someone using a screen reader or surfing
with images turned off. This is where Bobby needs to be supplemented with
some manual checks. For
example, the graphic used for the McAfee.com clinic has alt text, but the
alt text is actually the filename of the image, SickPC120x90.gif. Bobby
can’t tell the difference between a filename and meaningful alt text.
I would suggest that Linda change this to “Sick PC? We recommend
McAfee.Com Clinic – Get it now – click here”.
**Actually
I wish I was rich and didn't need to depend on these advertisers in the
first place...but I will fix McAfee's bad alt tag...no problem at
all....as well as all the other alt tags I have that Bobby sees as
insufficient, not to mention the many I missed. I thought I was
actually pretty good with alt tags. This is certainly revealing.**
Making
these changes will allow Linda to put the Bobby Approved logo on her page
(appropriately alt tagged, of course!). However, there are some other
things she may want to check out as well. Take a look at Priority Level 1,
User Check #6, “if you use color to convey information, make sure the
information is also represented another way.” There are two issues here
– people who can’t see the color at all, because they are blind, or,
people who are color blind. The
classic example of a page that depends on the use of color is a form that
says: “Fields marked in red are required.” Someone who has the
red/green deficit form of colorblindness will see those fields as brown,
not red.
**So,
what if I use color simply to make the page look more attractive?
Will Bobby flag this as a problem every time I do this? Note that
here I am using purple to make my comments stand out, but I also used the
stars. Is this sufficient for Bobby?**
There’s
a wonderful online tool called Vischeck. This tool will show you how your page will look to
someone who is colorblind. Just as with the online version of Bobby, all
you need to do is type in the URL of the page you want to test, you
don’t have to download anything to your computer.
**OK.....I
ran that tool and I think the color looks fine....The American Flag looks
a little sick, but the text is still fine. The colored hyperlinks
still show. So, how do I convince Bobby that this is NOT a
problem?**
I
ran the Vischeck tool against the newsletter page; for the most part, it
looks OK, although not all that attractive. The only problem I could see
that the text in the Linda’s Computer Stop logo (the one that looks like
a computer screen), originally green on black, is unreadable in the
Vischeck output. Linda may want to experiment with perhaps changing the
text to white, or trying a different set of contrasting colors.
**hmmmm.....I
could read it. It's white on a black background. Can't you
read it, Kathleen? Actually, if there's a problem with that logo,
I'll have to talk to our own Hal Cardona cuz he made it for me. LOL
**
Getting
back to the Bobby
report, there’s another feature that webmasters will find
useful, even if they are not checking for accessibility. Scroll all the
way down to bottom of the report, to the Download Time section of
the report. Here you will find the download time statistics for the
images, applets, and objects on the page for someone using a 28.8K
connection to the Internet. Using the information in this report will
point you to images that may need to be compressed to make your pages load
faster.
**Well,
I finally got to the bottom of their page after scrolling through miles of
error messages about my tables which are only there for layout and most of
these errors do not apply. How do I let Bobby know this? And,
the only graphic I see at the bottom that is rather large and loads a
little slowly is my waving American flag and that ain't going nowhere!**
This
article is by no means all there is to making your web site accessible.
There are many web sites you can visit for more information, and many
other tools you can use. I would recommend visiting the Web Accessibility
Initiative web site at the W3C (World Wide Web
Consortium). You can also visit the Tools section of the web site of the
State of
Connecticut Web Site Accessibility Committee.
**Thanks
Kathleen. I haven't implemented any of these changes yet because I
want the readers to see this as it stands now, so they can compare it with
how the site looks for the next issue. Though I'm not sure I can get
though ALL those errors without some help from you! And, it seems my
slangy dialog poses some problems also. I sure hope Bobby doesn't
expect me to write like a stuffed shirt, cuz that just ain't my
nature. LOL**
Kathleen
Anderson is a webmaster at the State
of Connecticut and chairs their committee on web site accessibility
for persons with disabilities. She also has her own web design company, Spider
Web Woman Designs.
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