What is accessibility?
The web is of course a wonderful medium, but there are certain groups of users that desire special attention:
- The blind
- Blind users can use assistive technologies such as screen readers. Screen readers will read a page to a user and rely heavily on well-structured markup. I've tried to use the most semantic markup I could come up with, in order to provide blind users with a well-structured, logical document.
- The visually impaired
- Being visually impaired does not always mean one can't see at all. It might be someone's colour blind, or might need a higher contrast layout. For this group I have provided an additional, high-contrast stylesheet, which can be selected from the preferences column on the right.
- People with mobility issues
- There are people using the web that never touch a mouse, but rely on a keyboard for their every action. Just as screen readers, these people need a well-structured document for quick navigation using, for instance, the Tab-key. In addition, almost every link on my website can be accessed using an accesskey (use ALT-accesskey (Windows) or Control-accesskey (Mac) to activate the corresponding link). The following keys are in use:
- 1
- The homepage
- 2
- About
- 3
- Articles
- 4
- Résumé
- 5
- Portfolio
- 6
- The accessibility-page (where you are now)
- 7
- Contact
- 8
- The searchbox
- s
- Submit comment to an article
Unobtrusive scripting
Unobtrusive scripting means the separation of content and behaviour. Scripting should only be used for progressive enhancement. In other words, a website should be perfectly usable for users who have Javascript disabled and scripting should only be used to enhance certain features.
My website does exactly that. It uses a bit of scripting to spice up the site's behaviour, or enhance the usability, but it will never rely on these techniques.
Cross-browser compatibility
Web professionals hate the line Optimized for Internet Explorer on 1024 * 768
. So do I. I've tested this website in the following browsers on different screen resolutions:
- Firefox
- Mozilla (although there is one tiny bug that I'm going to fix as soon as I find the time)
- Internet Explorer 5.0 (for Windows)
- Internet Explorer 5.5 (for Windows)
- Internet Explorer 6.0 (for Windows)
- Internet Explorer 7.0 (for Windows)
- Konqueror
- Opera
- Netscape Navigator
- Safari
Note: there are of course more browsers in use, but I haven't gotten my hands on them yet. When I do, I'll make sure to test in them too.