Accessible web authoring
- Write web documents which actually gets read!

The quick guide

1. Validate your documents and style sheets. This ensures that they don't contain small mistakes your current browser overlooks.
   • W3C HTML Validation Service
   • W3C CSS2 Validation Service
   • WDG HTML Validator
   • WDG CSSCheck
2. Viewable With Any Browser explains what to do in order to not write for just a certain browser
3. See if you have avoided the Frequently Encountered Problems: HTML
4. Use the HTML Authoring Services to check how your documents may be seen using other tools
   • The Lynx Viewer doesn't just tell you about that browser, but approximates what can be seen with other browsers which are in "images off" mode
   • The Search Engine Simulator shows what may be your most important visitors will see

Further reading

• The Web Design Group has an article on accessibility myths.
• What's Wrong With FONT?
• Widen Your Web Site's Audience is strongly recommended reading for everyone intending to "optimise" their documents, as is Designing Web Sites for Multiple Browsers Without Being Bland.
• The Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability
• Design a site that's not characterised as "This page optimized for ..." - arguing with customers.
• ALT texts in IMG.
• Good Site Design Practices contains very useful information.
• Why frames suck most of the time and What is wrong with Netscape's frame model.

  If "FRAMESET" is the answer, the question was misunderstood.
  

  -- Urban Fredriksson

  I think a good argument against using frames is the example set by two categories of sites. One is the web indexes, of which several implemented frames early on (after all, it seems so logical to have one search window, one with the results and one for the found document one selects), but quit after just a couple of months. They fiercly compete for users, because they live by advertisement income, so they apparently found they got more users without frames. The other example is the company which came up with the current implementation of frames. They held out a bit longer than the web indexes, but then also dropped the frames from their front page.

  In none of these examples the reason for dropping frames cannot have been that one excluded users who didn't have frames-enabled browsers, as the mechanism to cater for them is built into the frames model. So it must have been that user feedback or the study of log files showed that either users don't like frames or that they instead of being helped by them was hindered in their efforts to use the sites (which expressed another way is the same as the site owner got less of the result they wanted from sites with frames).

Last updated 2002 Sep 06 by Urban.

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