As I progress in my advocacy of web accessibility, I’m noticing a sea change in what I consider myself professionally.

For the majority of my career, I’ve considered myself a “web designer”. While I’ve never felt my designs to be the most eye-popping, stunning masterpieces, I inherently put together visuals that are straightforward, clean and effective. Still, web design was my wheelhouse, and the subject of my strongest advocacy. Beautiful designs equalled great web sites.

Though it’s been out there for a few years now, I recently heard the quote from web design and standards luminary Jeffrey Zeldman:
“Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”

That sentiment is really sticking with me. Decoration.

I’ve been in the web/e-commerce industry for twelve years now. Now more than ever, I’m seeing that design is but a piece to the puzzle of an effective web site. A finished jigsaw puzzle reveals the whole picture; one solitary piece doesn’t.

Content is a key piece.
User experience is a key piece.
Accessibility (or more broadly, well-constructed, semantic markup) is a key piece.

I’ve too often watched content writing, user experience and accessibility get kicked to the curb. This isn’t always intentional — sometimes they get skipped to meet rushed deadlines. Sometimes it’s just ignorance to their value. “Make it beautiful and people will come!”

And so, I’ve seen designs that look absolutely phenomenal…but do not effectively tell me what the site is about. I’ve seen designs with brilliant visuals and sizzle…that are hard to navigate. I’ve listened to marketing folks harp that their site needs to be beautiful and “sexy” (a nauseating word to describe web sites)…but don’t take a single moment to actually listen to their users.

If a site has the greatest aesthetics in the world, but it doesn’t take into account its users, it’s a failure. At the end of the day, people — whether they are disabled or not — want to get where they need to go.

Design will always be part of who I am. But I’m no longer swayed simply by shiny objects and pretty pictures. Something beautiful constructed in Photoshop is great….but it better clearly show what the site is about, have clear-cut navigation, and elements that are important and logical to visitors. And it sure better not throw up obstacles to those with disabilities simply trying to get what they need.

Over the past year, I’ve found myself cutting down on the web design RSS feeds and replacing them with user experience ones. I’m not interested in the latest PhotoShop tips and tutorials. I’ll leave those for others — the most important thing to me now is advocating the union of design, user experience, content and accessibility, not focusing on simply decoration.

Tags: accessibility, content, jeffrey zeldman, user experience, ux, web design

Recently, I was reviewing a couple web sites for accessibility recommendations and noticed something that’s starting to become a pet peeve.

Links were only identifiable by being a different color from the content around them. They weren’t bolded or underlined. A link was, for example, blue, amidst copy that was black.

This can cause significant problems for those with certain types of color blindness or vision limitations that prevent them from seeing certain colors. If you take color out of the equation, there is absolutely no way to visually identify which parts of these pages are links.

I think it can be confusing even for people with full vision, especially if the same color chosen for links is also used for other stylistic reasons.

It seemed like it was fashionable in the design world a few years ago to get away from the tried-and-true underlining of links. Even today there’s a fair number of sites who just have links as a different color.

If you’re dead set against using underlines for whatever design reason, at least make links a different color AND bolded so there’s differentiation between the rest of the content. Just make sure you don’t use bold for other, non-linking elements then.

It’s a time-honored expectation for links to be underlined on the Web — except in very few cases, I don’t think keeping it that way messes up too many awesome designs.

Some Tools For Testing Color:

Tags: links, user experience, ux

I’m in the very early stages of putting together accessibility improvements for an e-commerce web site. The site is several years old, and while it isn’t a complete accessibility disaster, there are many ways it can be improved. The markup was constructed decently enough, but it’s safe to say that accessibility wasn’t so much as even a fleeting thought.

My efforts are part of an overall project to improve and refresh the look and information architecture of the web site. From both a design and user experience perspective, we’ve advocated refreshing the site through gradual enhancements, instead of a massive, all-at-once redesign.

I’m excited at the chance to steer some real accessibility improvement on this project. This is a chance to get in there and make immediate improvements.

Some of the things I aim to do right out of the gate are:

These are easy “quick wins” that can be done without massive amounts of effort.

Not every accessibility undertaking — or redesign/refresh overall — needs to be a huge undertaking. For one, there may not be a budget to completely overhaul a site. Also, such overhauls can potentially be too sudden and startling a change for visitors who have been there before.

You don’t have to wait for the big, all-encompassing project to make improvements. You can tackle it piece and piece and, incrementally, improve the accessibility.

As I knock off each of those bullets above as well as whatever else I find, the site will become better and better for those who visit via screen readers, keyboard navigation or whatever means they need to. The site will become better and better, period.

Tags: accessibility, alt tags, color contrast, header tags, keyboard navigation, screen readers, usability, user experience