Magazine

Web Usability and Technology, by Arthur R. Murphy

Where Do I Find These Techniques?

1. The W3C / WAI group is doing the essential work in the area of universal design. The World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has just published a new Working Draft of the "WAI Accessibility Guidelines: Page Authoring." The WAI Page Author Guidelines Working Group has worked for several months to reprioritize and restructure these guidelines, and increase their usability. See http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WD-WAI-PAGEAUTH. This document includes a detailed "Techniques" documents, providing technical information on how to implement the guidelines. For example:

   Modality independence: Provide alternative representations of all non-text information so that a page may be perceived and used without being seen and without being heard. (http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/techniques.htm)

2. See also the National Center for Accessible Media. The CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) is a research and development facility that works to make media accessible to underserved populations such as disabled persons, minority-language users, and people with low literacy skills. See: http://www.wgbh.org/wgbh/pages/ncam/index.html

3. Apple is deeply committed to helping persons with special needs attain an unparalleled level of independence through a personal computer. Every Macintosh ships with rich, built-in features that support a positive user experience for disabled people. http://www.apple.com/education/k12/disability/

4. MSN Site Builder Network's Accessibility tutorial is presently at http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/design/layout/accessible.asp

5. With nearly 750 million people worldwide with a disability, it makes sense--both ethically and legally--to ensure that your site is accessible for persons with disabilities. Joe Lazzaro helps to shed some light on ways to ensure that your site is accessible, and talks about how Sun, IBM and Microsoft are working to make applications and the Internet more user-friendly. See http://webreview.com/wr/pub/98/09/04/feature/index.html

6. See how adaptive technology, in the way of Java applications, are improving the accessibility of the Internet and other applications for persons with disabilities: http://webreview.com/wr/pub/98/09/04/feature/index3.html

7. Extensible Style Language (XSL) language: Joint Submission request to W3C by W3C Members Microsoft Corp., Inso Corp., and ArborText, Inc. See http://www.w3.org/Submission/1997/13/Inso

8. CSS2 offers greater flexibility for Web developers to style and position objects on their pages. See what's in store in this quick and dirty digest of the proposed specification: http://webreview.com/wr/pub/98/09/04/style/index.html

9. Builder.Com's style sheet notes are at: http://builder.cnet.com/Authoring/CSS/index.html

10. Aural cascading style sheets is an idea in process. See: http://www.w3.org/TR/PR-CSS2/css2.txt

11. Jakob Nielsen's effective use of style sheets: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9707a.html

12. MSN's overview of CSS is presently at: http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/design/type/site1114.asp

13. CSS GALLERY MSN is presently at: http://www.microsoft.com/opentype/css/gallery/4.htm

    A newspaper-style example: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/css/gallery/slide3.htm

    Same content, diffferent style: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/css/gallery/extract1.htm