We feel bad about missing Grey Tuesday, CSS Reboot and all the April Fools shennanigans (too much work, not enough sleep), but we finally found something we can join/support in with little to no difficulty: CSS Naked Day. For the whole of today (April 5th), we’ve turned the CSS off for both this site and Easy Designs. We hope you enjoy their rich, semantic goodness.
On WaSP today, Derek wrote an incredibly poignant post about the NFB lawsuit against Target. In fact, I thought it so relevant to the interactive work we do at Cronin and Company (the ad agency I work for), that I forwarded a copy of it to everyone who works there. The reaction was, for the most part, pretty good (at least from those that read it), but there’s always at least one person who just doesn’t get it.
I received the following feedback via email from one of the higher-ups in our company (who shall remain nameless):
Is Target forcing blind people to shop there? If they don’t does Target hurt them in some way?
If it doesn’t meet web standards, why don’t blind people just shop somewhere else? Is Target funded by the government?
If Target doesn’t want to change their web site why should I get upset about it? (I don’t hold any Target stock either.)
I couldn’t belive what I was hearing. What an unhealthy attitude.
I sent him an email back. Perhaps it was a bit harsh—though not as harsh as my first draft—but this is something I’m passionate about. I thought I’d share it because I think accessibility is dismissed as “unimportant” far too often:
I imagine you’ve heard of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. The ADA and related laws ensure equal treatment for disabled persons in terms of access, housing, employment, voting, etc. Do you consider wheelchair ramps pointless? Handicapped doors? Elevators? Just curious.
The changes necessary to make a website accessible—in a manner similar to the way “brick and mortar” businesses are required by law to be—are not great at all. In fact, we do it routinely with every site we build (at least every one I oversee) at no additional charge and it takes no additional time, just a little forethought. So cost can’t be an excuse to hide behind.
But if you want another reason to do it, consider SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Google (and all web spidering applications, for that matter) are the greatest consumers of websites in existence. And they don’t see the pretty pictures and they don’t use a mouse. Semantically marked-up, accessible, web standards-based documents routinely generate higher search rankings than non-semantic/standards/accessible ones because the content is accessible.
Then there’s the cost savings in maintenance, the cost savings in server storage space, the cost savings in bandwidth usage, the faster page downloads for your users, and the ability to deploy the same content to multiple devices/media—print, TVs, PDAs and cellphones, just to name a few. In terms of benefits, the list goes on and on, and all of these come at no additional cost when you use web standards.
If you don’t see the point in making the effort for selfless reasons, perhaps these will make more sense.
I realize that most of you reading this have, more likely than not, already joined the accessibility bandwagon. Some selflessly even. I just needed a moment to publicly rant. Thanks.
Eric has a very enlightened post for those of you out to document bugs in IE7 Beta 2. He also echoed my feelings that this is a beta people!
Trying to fix a site that’s “broken” in IE7B2 is kind of like deciding to raze your profitable gas station just because you heard car companies are experimenting with hydrogen fuel cells. When the final version of IE7 comes out, then you can worry about what to do. Maybe your site won’t be “broken” any more, and you won’t have to do anything.
As Eric also mentioned, over on the IE Blog, they’ve posted an entry about the current state of CSS fixes in IE7 and what you should be able to do now. Also, for those of you who (like me) uninstalled the beta because it caused you to lose your IE6, here are instructions on how to have both (found somewhere in the comments on digg.com):
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 for public consumption yesterday. Based on everything I’d been reading, the development team seemed to be moving in the right direction. I decided to take it for a test drive to see how things were coming along.
The answer is “not well” I’m afraid. I took my first journey in the new browser over to my friend Andy’s house. I did this mainly because I love how Andy handles IE. It’s beautiful. I wanted to see if IE7 did the right thing and got the real design for And All That Malarkey. As it began rendering, my heart was racing and I was ecstatic to see the beautiful blues and reds of Andy’s blog coming through. Then, something a little odd happened. Somehow IE7 missed the boat and the page was rendered virtually unreadable (except the latest articles section) because a bunch of And All That Malarkey logos kept popping up everywhere.
Now according to Chris Wilson over at Microsoft (who’s team has been working closely with the wonderful folks at WaSP to make IE7 standards-compliant):
Beta 1 makes little progress for web developers in improving our standards support, particularly in our CSS implementation. I feel badly about this, but we have been focused on how to get the most done overall for IE7, so due to our lead time for locking down beta releases and ramping up our team, we could not get a whole lot done in the platform in beta 1. However, I know this will be better in Beta 2
At the same time, I know Andy’s a stand-up guy and his CSS is top notch, easily some of the best I’ve seen, this problem’s gotta lie with IE7. I guess you can only expect so much from a beta (even a “beta 2”), but that’s a doosie of an error. At least IE7 was easy to uninstall and I’ve got some commentary to leave on the IE7 Beta 2 feedback form.
While working on a new site for a client, I stumbled upon an application of the Leahy/Langridge method of image replacement… to images. As far as I know, it had not been attempted before and, frankly, I was a little amazed it worked.
The technique, which I am calling iIR for “img Image Replacement” (a bit of a mouthful, I know), helps you keep you code leaner and meaner without sacrificing stylability or accessibility. You can read the article on the Easy Designs and feel free to drop your comments below. Maybe you can think of a better name for it too.