Usability: making sure your visitors can find what they are looking for.
If the viewer has to work too hard to find the navigation logic of your website then s/he is not going to hang around for long (unless they like puzzles and have time to waste!) So usability - the ease with which a visitor can move around your website - is clearly important.
Much has been written on this thorny subject and attempts have been made to create usability 'rules'. Many of these attempts to codify usability end up producing websites that are visually boring and sometimes actually hard to navigate.
At Leaping Hare we believe in a pragmatic approach to usability. We believe that we create sites that are easy to navigate, yet deliver the message and company image with style. Typically you can get to any page in just two clicks and always have a good indication where you currently are in the site. Feedback from our clients' customers says we usually get it about right.
Accessibility: designing for people with disabilities
We believe that everyone should be able to access the information on the internet. That includes people who may have visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities.
W3C (World
Wide Web Consortium) has set detailed standards that should enable people
with any disability to access a website that adheres to them. The problem
is that many of the guidelines are open to interpretation, while some
are seeking a draconian perfection that may be unnecessary. It is interesting
to note that when we tested the W3C "Introduction to Web Accessibility" page for adherence to their own W3C accessibility guidelines we found three instances
of non-compliance!
If you wish, Leaping Hare can build a site for you that fully meets these W3C accessibility guidelines; but you should understand that constructing a site that meets every disability requirement to the letter can restrict your visual design options.
Again, we generally take a pragmatic view. All our sites have the basic disability access features, such as ALT tags on images etc., but we take the view that just because someone is disabled it doesn't mean they are not resourceful. An appropriate choice of browser will make almost any well coded web page accessible.
So, for example, this site might fail some accessibility tests because it uses a fixed font size (to preserve page layout and design) and possibly on some of the colours used. However, this site uses CSS styles and is designed to work with the Opera browser. Opera will allow you to enlarge any web page (up to a thousand percent) and provides the facility to replace the CSS with whatever colours and styles the user chooses.
We have tested all the pages on this site and they pass all the W3C automatic checkpoints and we are confident that it complies with the manual verification checkpoints too. So we trust that the Leaping Hare site is fully accessible. If you find that it is not accessible in some way please let us know.
So how do you benefit from having an accessible site?
Having an accessible site does take a little extra time and effort but there are some real, positive benefits from having a website that everyone can use.
It could give you a competitive edge. For a start there are
8.6 million disabled people in the UK with an annual spending power
of £50 billion; so a market sector that you can't afford to ignore!
Also, making your website accessible for disabled users can improve
usability for non-disabled people too. And, if customers find your
site easy to use, they are likely to come back to you more often, buy
more, tell others, and remain loyal.
Hopefully you are, and want to be seen as, socially responsible. So if your site is a good example of web accessibility your image is enhanced.
Of course there are growing legal obligations on businesses to ensure that disabled customers are not discriminated against. So it is worth making sure that your website doesn't let you down.
Leaping Hare can help you build an internet presence that ensures a good experience for all visitors.
It helps to use good code
Well coded XHTML pages are more accessible than those created in HTML because they follow strict rules and avoid non–standard markup. Not only will well written, clean code be better for those with disabilities but also XHTML helps pages download faster and it seems that some search engines look more favourably on standards compliant pages. Using XHTML also makes it easier to repurpose content if you want to format it for WAP mobile phones and other devices.
All new websites from Leaping Hare are now being built using XHTML and CSS to W3C standards.
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