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| design |
Considerations of design and accessibility | |
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The design of a web site differs from that of a newsletter or brochure or flyer in may respects. The designer does not have overall control of how the page or pages will look when viewed by the audience. There are many web browsers in use. Undoubtedly, Microsoft's Internet Explorer family is that in most frequent use. But others use Netscape, Opera, Mosaic, Lynx, etc. The same browser on different platforms and operating systems will produce different results. Apple Macs show colors and fonts in a more exact way than PCs can handle. Some users choose to turn off pictures to speed the surfing. The source code for displaying pages in a web browser is called HTML (Hypertext Mark-Up Language). If you want to see what it looks like there is an option, usually under the View button on your browser to display the Source Code. Try it now. The code for this page starts: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <title>Hotwells Web Services - design</title> Complicated, eh? But not overly so. The first line describes the dialect of HTML in which the document is written - in this case HTML 4.01 transitional. The title line produces the page title which you see on the top bar of most browsers. If you are using Internet Explorer 4 or Netscape 4 or later versions then you should see the text above in red and in a smaller and different font than the rest of this page. But people using other browsers may not see the same thing. This is the crucial difference between print design and web design. You cannot be absolutely sure that a Apple Mac with Netscape dispalys the same thing as a PC with Internet Explorer. But no need to worry! If the HTML coding is correct both people will get the same information. It does mean however that the layout design should not be used to communicate information. I have written this page to display text in the font called Verdana on PCs or Helvetica on Apple Macs. Some users may see the text in Times or some other font that they have specified for their own use. And in a larger or smaller size. In addition not all users will be able to display Macromedia Flash or other animations on their screens. So if you want those sort of cool effects, you may need to provide an alternative for some users. Many web authoring packages, such as Microsoft's FrontPage produce non standard code which can look a mess in alternative browsers. So you or your designer need to be aware of these problems. There is no point in making your site inaccessible to a significant minority of users! And don't forget people with visual impairments who may be using text to speech browsers which "read" the text and descriptions of visual images.  
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