There are plenty of places you can read a rant by some web developer about Web Standards and how things are a shambles. They are, but I'll spare you. Suffice to say that occasionally, things have to be done so that a web page can be viewed with all sorts of crazy technologies: Screen readers (for the blind), mobile phones (for those constantly in motion), Internet Explorer (for people with low enough attention spans that they're not gotten all the way to TSW's footer), etc. Below is a list of some of the things I've done to the site so that it can be better viewed by those using such technologies. --Ben
- The menu has a Java Script built in to support Internet Explorer's poor CSS support. IE users should be able to tell no difference in the menu's rendering in IE from the rendering in Firefox. This does not include IE/Mac, which is no longer supported by Microsoft, let alone spread about by Apple.
- The title text (in the graphic) also exists in plain-text for so that users with screen readers or graphics turned off can still see the title of the site. This is done with the Shea Enhancement of the Gilder/Levin method.
- The menu degrades so that users with CSS off see all menu options in a nested unordered list format.
- As much as possible, aesthetics concerns have been left out of the XHTML so as to make screen readers' jobs much easier and CSS has been used to make things look pretty. Additionally, title and alt fields have been used as much as possible for the same reason.
