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Last Modified March 25, 1998
Introduction |
Contents |
Key Terms |
Design Elements
Design Testing and Considerations |
Accessible Design Tools
If you would like to make your web pages usable by everyone, it is important that you emphasize standards compliance. By complying with existing standards, rather than relying upon browser specific extensions and hacks, you can make sure that the web sites you design will be readable by all browsers supporting those standards, not just the ones you have time to test it on, and that your page designs won't break when new browsers and versions come into existence. HTML tags that go through the standards process are evaluated more thoroughly and designed for graceful degradation on older browsers.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the focal point for web standards- see their pages for more details:
When writing to an HTML standard, make sure to pick the one most appropriate to your needs. If you don't need any extended features, or expect to have a lot of visitors with very old browsers, you may want to stick to HTML 2.0 compliance. Most currently updated browsers have support for HTML 3.2, so it is generally the best to use if you want to use features not in HTML 2.0 (don't forget to plan for graceful degradation). If you need some of the newest features of HTML, like frames, HTML 4.0 is what you should use, but remember that most browsers do not support most of the new features included in HTML 4.0 yet, and you should setup your pages to degrade gracefully.
In order to make pages that are viewable by all, it is very important that you test and validate your pages.
Nobody has time to test pages in all the browsers that are out there, but by making sure your HTML doesn't have mistakes in it, you can make sure that no browsers will choke on errors in your HTML. Browsers are fault tolerant by design, but to different degrees, and so while one browser may recover from errors in your pages without you noticing a difference, those same errors may cause another browser to render a page with noticable problems. One excellent example of this is what happened when Netscape 2.0 came out. Previous versions of Netscape allowed you to skip a matching quote in a link with no ill effects, but when Netscape 2.0 came out, it was more strict, and wouldn't close the link till it found the next quote. A lot of people had to go hunting through their many HTML pages for missing quotes and fix them when this happened (me included :). So make sure to validate your pages as you're writing them so you don't have to go back and fix them later.
There are many excellent validators available on the Internet. Some are available for download and are platform specific, while others have web based interfaces, such as:
For more information about the value of validating web pages, see:
A linter is another method of checking for errors on a web page. Unlike a validator, a linter doesn't check specifically against a published set of rules for HTML. Instead, it looks for common mistakes (and sometimes just poor formatting that isn't necessarily technically wrong) and points them out, such as missing ALT text, no HEIGHT and WIDTH tags on images, etc. Since linters and validators look for different types of errors on a web page, it's very often a good idea to use them both. Most of the web based validators also have the option of including results from Weblint, probably the most popular linter. For more information about Weblint, which is written in Perl and runs on most platforms which have Perl support, see:
In addition to validating your pages, it is also a good idea to test in a representative selection of browsers to see if there are any problems with your pages that you didn't catch in the validation process. It is a good idea to test in Netscape and/or Internet Explorer since those browsers are used by a sizeable portion of the Internet. In addition, you should also test in a text-only browser, like Lynx, and you should probably also select another browser for testing. Testing on multiple platforms, browser versions, color depths, and resolutions is also a good way to find problems that you may otherwise miss.
Bandwidth conservation is important in making your sites useable by everyone because sites that are slow to load can discourage visitors to your site. In general, it's a good idea for all sites to do their best to limit the size of downloads required to view their pages, both to improve your site, and to keep from overtaxing the net as a whole. Most visitors to sites connect over modems, which aren't fast enough to allow for quick loading of most pages, and some users, especially ones outside of the US, pay for their time online or their local calls, which means that the more downloading they have to do, the less likely they'll stick around.
Many site designers don't realize that there are many ways to reduce the
size of their graphics significantly. Using JPEGs instead of GIFs in
appropriate cases, reducing the colors used in GIFs, optimizing animated
GIFs for size, and substituting text for graphics where appropriate are all
effective ways of helping your site load more quickly. In addition,
providing the
HEIGHT and
WIDTH attributes whenever using images can allow the browser to
leave room for the graphics and load the text first. For more details on
bandwidth conservation, see:
Although designing sites for all browsers can be accomplished without knowing all the details about different browsers and what they support, it is sometimes helpful to know details on which browsers support various features, and to what extent. Below are some sites that can help you track down the information you may want to know:
Many users of the web have special needs that should be considered when designing web sites. Designing sites that are accessible by all browsers is a good step towards making your site usable by everyone, but you may want to check into ways to make your pages more easily accessible by visitors with visual impairments and other special needs:
It is very common for people designing web sites to forget locality issues that are important when dealing with the World Wide Web.
Some of the most common problems with world wide understandability of web pages have to do with information relating to date, time, location and currency. There are many different date formats in use throughout the world, so choosing one that is clear to all people is important. Specifying time zone information for time critical information on a web page is also necessary to avoid confusion. Location information should be complete, rather than relying upon abbreviations that may only be understood locally, or skipping vital context such as country names. Currency such as dollars, which are used by multiple countries with different values, should specify which type.
For more information on avoiding confusion over such information, see:
If you would like to make your site readable in lanugages other than English, there are many issues involved, such as which character sets to use and whether language negotiation is appropriate for your site. For more information, see:
Accessible Site Design Guide:
Introduction |
Contents |
Key Terms |
Design Elements
Design Testing and Considerations |
Accessible Design Tools