Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Target has been charged with violating the American Disabilities Act by not developing their website to be 508 compliant–accessible to all. The lawsuit claims that people who are visually impaired cannot navigate Target’s web site with the same ease as someone without impairment.

This case brings to light a number of issues.

1. Are corporate websites marketing, operations or a whacky hybrid?
Target.com is being treated as a brick and mortar store. Obviously Target stores are accessible to everyone. Not developing target.com to be 508 compliant is a search engine and business guffaw but I seriously doubt they meant to be exclusive.

2. In all forms, user accessibility is smart business. From Capstrat’s perspective accessibility is smart design. We challenge ourselves to design towards an elegant solution that balances need, want, logic and emotion. All communicators should create Web sites (and everything else for that matter) that are inclusive, clear and compelling.

3. This sets a unique precedent.
As mentioned above, I believe designing for accessibility is both right and smart. But I wonder, “What if the type is too small for me to read?” May I claim discrimination against people over 40? What if the interface designer checks out and uses a palette that is incorrect? Do color blind suffers have a case? I know that sounds silly but ask yourself, “Is it marketing or virtual brick and mortar?” What about their TV ads with no voice over? Oh man. My head hurts.

Should visually impaired people ignore target.com and shop at the compliant rival walmart.com? Maybe. I believe you vote with your wallet. If enough leave Target will notice and redesign the site. As a loyal Target brand enthusiast, I have to believe plans are in the works.

Accessibility has become an increasingly popular buzzword in the world of web development. Its principles should drive all modern website design, but the reasons why they should may be more significant than you might first think. The definition of web accessibility is often oversimplified as the practice of creating sites that can be used by people with disabilities. This definition glosses over the business rationale of investing in accessible design. Any business or organization with a web presence needs to make accessibility a priority, not only because it will increase your site's visitor-base, but most importantly because it is the right thing to do. An inaccessible site is exclusionary, turning away would-be visitors with a lack of empathy that only a cold, hard machine like a web server can manage. Visitors who can't access the content on your site will directly associate this lack of empathy with your organization. Clearly, excluding users of your site for lack of accessibility is not just bad for your image - it's simply unethical.

I know I'm being a little preachy here, but with good reason. Given the technologies available for web development today, there is little excuse for making sites that are not accessible. With the ability to separate site content from format (see my article on this here), web developers, designers, and authors have all the power they need to create sites that can be used by all of their visitors despite any disabilities those visitors may have.

It is obvious that accessibility is important, but what is it really about? Accessibility is about more than addressing the obvious concerns of how individuals with vision or hearing disabilities use your site. It also addresses how someone with a repetitive stress injury or someone who cannot accurately control a mouse might use your site. It even considers how to allow access to your site by a visitor who does not have a disability but has a slow Internet connection and wants to view your site using a text-only browser. Generally, accessibility is all about being as inclusive as possible. The method of designing for accessibility makes sites that are usable by individuals with disabilities. Its also adds the benefit that the sites it produces are cleaner and more intuitive for everyone to use. I encourage web developers and CEOs alike to consider how the concepts of accessibility are applied in practice. The World Wide Web Consortium has published an excellent document here illustrating several accessibility scenarios. Check it out - it'll be well worth the ten-minute read.

So maybe now you've considered a bit more about web accessibility than you had before. Designing sites for accessibility is here to stay. Just like building architects must ensure that all people will be able to access every floor and room in their designs, web architects must guarantee that everyone will be able to access all of the pages and use all of the features in their sites. Rather than considering design for accessibility an obstacle, embrace it - it will produce a more intuitive website, and its use will better represent your organization in your market and community.

At Capstrat, we're committed to keeping up with the web. Our design experts will address and resolve your site's accessibility issues. Whether you have an aging site that could use a facelift or you need a new site built from the ground up, our designers, developers, and communications experts will help your business or organization achieve the future-ready web presence that you need to succeed in this digital age.

A promising development for the future of the web has been in the works for the past five years. An increasing number of users have switched to web browsers like Firefox, Opera, and Safari [wikipedia], helping to usher in the era of modern, standards-compliant websites. These browsers are heroes for the web development community, as they provide excellent support for W3C web standards (why does this matter). However, Microsoft's Internet Explorer is still the most commonly used web browser throughout the world, accounting for slightly more than eighty percent of the browser market right now [wikipedia]. For those of us working in web development, this fact presents a daily hurdle, as Internet Explorer's support for modern web standards has traditionally been lacking. Developers write web page code that works with standards-compliant browsers and then they painstakingly write fixes or "hacks" for the code (in a bizarre and contrived fashion) to get the pages working in IE. This process can discourage a developer from being creative with his or her usage of existing web standards, but - there is hope on the horizon. With Microsoft's release of Internet Explorer 7 in October 2006, the challenge of creating standards-compliant websites has begun to diminish. IE7 fixes many of the Internet Explorer quirks that have plagued developers since the widespread adoption of HTML and CSS, and it now supports some features that have long been available in competing browsers.

Throughout 2007, more users will be upgrading their web browsers to Internet Explorer 7 or switching to alternative browsers. As a direct consequence, web designers, developers, and authors will further shift toward the uniform usage of web standards. So what does this imply? How about a rich user experience regardless of the way the Internet is accessed. It won't matter whether you're visiting a site on your office desktop, your mobile phone, or your next-generation refrigerator - you'll have full access to a site's content and features. How about accessibility for all. Users with disabilities will not be hindered from using any part of a site. And how about lower development, maintenance, and hosting costs. Websites designed with modern standards are much easier to maintain, modify, and extend than those created with the design methodologies popularized in the late nineties. Such sites also use less bandwidth, because modern pages are composed of smaller files than their ancestors.

At Capstrat, we're committed to keeping up with the web. We're ready for the next generation of web browsers, and we are prepared to utilize these changing technologies to their maximum potential. Whether you have an aging site that could use a facelift or you need a new site built from the ground up, our designers, developers, and communications experts will help your business or organization achieve the future-ready web presence that you need to succeed in this digital age.

Have you ever had the distinct pleasure of listening to a web development nerd ramble on about why your website needs to use CSS and XHTML? Did you find your mind wandering or eyes glazing over when he went on and on about W3C standards? Don't worry - this happens all the time. As a web developer, I apologize for our kind's overzealous and sometimes ridiculous excitement over these obscure acronyms. But apologies aside, I would like to say a few things about why we all get so worked up about a few simple letters.

The technology for producing and publishing on the web has grown out of its infancy. The changes adopted in the past five years are now the cornerstone of modern web design and development: two languages called XHTML and CSS. The magic of these two languages (the part that gets web developers so excited) is their power and flexibility. In a nutshell, XHTML is a web language focused on content. It is used to spell out the textual content, media, and links on a web page. CSS is a language focused on formatting. It gets coupled with XHTML to specify things like where text should be placed on the page or what color the background of the page should be.

Bored yet? Well, don't be - here comes the good part... The underlying point here is not to simply explain these acronyms (by the way XHTML = eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language and CSS = Cascading Style Sheets), but rather to examine the design philosophy that these languages enable us to use. Modern web standards dictate that page content should be separated from page format. Concretely, this is actually done by storing the page content in an XHTML file and the page format in a separate CSS file. It may not be immediately clear why anyone would want to do things this way, so consider the following scenarios:

• Your web site has over 500 distinct pages. Recently your organization decided to change the background color of all the pages from pure white to a striking blue that matches your logo. Unfortunately, the pages weren't designed with XHTML and CSS, so a poor intern at your organization gets assigned the tedious task of changing the background color in hundreds of web page files. With modern design methods, all that would need to be changed is a single line of code in a CSS file.
• Market analysis shows that a significant and increasing number of your company's customers use their mobile phones to browse the Internet, and you'd like to attract them to your website. Your site was designed with its formatting embedded in the content (rather than in a separate CSS file). The site's width is 750 screen pixels, but a mobile-ready version of the site must be only 300 pixels wide. Since the site's format was specified in the same file as its content, every single file on the site will need to be rewritten to accommodate the change in width. Had the site been designed using XHTML and CSS, it would only have been necessary to modify a handful of CSS files to produce layout changes throughout the entire site.
• A customer with a vision disability visits your website using an assistive technology called a screen reader that reads the content of the site's pages aloud. Your site was designed in the year 2000, and its layout was created by embedding text and images inside of tables nested within tables (sound messy?). This sort of design was very common just a few years ago, because it allowed web designers to achieve precise control over how the website displayed in different web browsers. Unfortunately, the customer's screen reader cannot make sense of the table layout, and it reads the textual contents of the site in a confusing and illogical way. Frustrated by the experience, the customer returns to Google to search for a competitor's site that is more accessible. Had this site's content been separated from its format using XHTML and CSS, the customer's screen reader would have read the text on the site in the correct, logical order that was intended by the designer.

These scenarios demonstrate the key features of separating format from content in web design: maintainability, modifiability, and accessibility (and that's not even mentioning code readability, content manageability, or how-could-it-possibly-be-more-awesomeability). In a world where we all use document editors that let us format our text line by line and see the results immediately, it can be difficult to imagine how separating the text content from its format could be useful. What I mean is, imagine having to create and edit an extra file to change the font face from Times to Arial in the letter you just wrote in Word. That doesn't seem convenient or intuitive, but in a website, it's essential. Modern sites are typically hand-coded in XHTML and spread out across many files. There is no method to "select all text" and "change the font face to Arial" for every page in the site - that is, unless you're using CSS! So the next time your web development nerd rambles on about CSS, rest assured, he's speaking in your best interest.

At Capstrat, we're committed to keeping up with the web. We are experts in the usage of XHTML, CSS, and other key web technologies. Whether you have an aging site that could use a facelift or you need a new site built from the ground up, our designers, developers, and communications experts will help your business or organization achieve the future-ready web presence that you need to succeed in this digital age.