This month the web is 15 years old and in that short time it has revolutionised the way we live, from shopping to booking flights, writing blogs to listening to music and most recently, sharing videos.

In the 15th Century Johannes Gutenberg changed the world with his idea of printing by moveable type. The Bible he published in 1455 undermined the authority of the Catholic church, powered the Renaissance and the Reformation, enable the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science, even created new social classes.

Tim Berners-Lee has done something similar - he conceived a system for turning the internet into a publishing medium. Just over 15 years ago - on 6 August 1991, to be precise - he released the code for his invention on to the internet. He called it the World Wide Web, and had the inspired idea that it should be free so that anyone could use it.

And use it we did. With the result that the web grew exponentially - until today when nobody really knows how big it is. An estimate puts the size of the public web at 40 billion pages, but the size of the ‘deep’ web, the area where web pages are assembled on the fly and served up in response to clicked-upon links, is estimated to be between 400 and 750 times greater than the part that is indexed by search engines. Since you started reading this piece, thousands of pages have been added.

From such a colossal change in our information environment in 15 years, these are early days for the web. We can no more envisage the long-term implications of what has happened than dear old Gutenberg could.
It’s curious how casually we have come to take it for granted. We buy books from Amazon, airline tickets from Easyjet and Ryanair, holidays from expedia, tickets for theatres and cinemas online, as if doing so were the most natural thing in the world. We check the opening times at the Louvre in Paris or the Museum of Modern Art in New York (or browse their collections) online. We check definitions (and spellings) in online dictionaries, look up stuff in Wikipedia, search for houses to rent on rightmove. You can buy and sell just about anything (excluding body parts) on eBay. Children seeking pictures for school projects search for them on Google Images (and download them without undue concern for intellectual property rights). Holiday snaps escape from their shoeboxes and are published to the world on Flickr. Home movies likewise on YouTube. And of course anyone with doubts about a prospective blind date can do an exploratory check on Google before committing to an evening out with a total stranger.

All this we now take for granted. To get a handle on the scale of what has happened, think back to what the world was like 15 years ago. Amazon was a large river in South America. Ryanair was an Irish airline that flew to places nobody had ever heard of. eBay was a typo. Yahoo was a term from Gulliver’s Travels.  Classified ads were densely printed matter in newspapers. ‘Encyclopedia’ was a synonym for Encyclopedia Britannica. And if you wanted to read what your MP had said in the Commons yesterday you had to queue at the Stationery Office in London to buy Hansard. Oh, and there were quaint little shops in high streets called ‘travel agents’.
A googol was a very large number (one followed by a hundred zeroes).  Now Google is by far the most popular site in the UK, visited by millions daily

Ref:John Naughton’s history of the internet, A Brief History of the Future, is published by Phoenix at £7.99

Google is God.

Doing the right thing by Google is the best thing you can do for your website.
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines,” which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index. Once a site has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.

When your site is ready:

• Have other relevant sites link to yours.
• Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
• Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google webmaster tools. Google Sitemaps uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
• Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
• Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Design and content guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
• Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Technical guidelines

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.
If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s quality guidelines, please report that site at http://www. google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Quality guidelines - basic principles

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

If a site doesn’t meet Google’s quality guidelines, it may be blocked from the index. If you determine that your site doesn’t meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and request reinclusion.

Source: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Why should I go to the trouble of making my site accessible?

Source : http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/googleisgod.html

“Who gives a hoot about the Lynx browser? Nobody uses it.” Other people said “Making your site look good in Lynx is like accessibility. I’m not selling to the blind so why should I go to the trouble of making my site accessible?”
Why? Because the most powerful Internet force known to God and man visits your web pages like blind people and folks who use Lynx -- Google.
Google is blind and reads your sites linearly -- as the code is sent to the browser -- and then tries to interpret what it “sees” (I like to use the analogy that it reads your site like blind people read using Braille).
Google doesn’t give a left-hand, flying farkle about how pretty your page looks in Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Safari, or any other browser. Google cares about content, links to your site, ALT attributes (it seems to be a little schizo on this -- there are times it cares and times it doesn’t), TITLE tags, and so much more that a whole industry has sprung up trying to figure out what Google likes and dislikes. (One of the biggest arguments is over the question of whether Google likes/doesn’t care about web pages that use valid X/HTML code. Google seems to like code that validates.)
Where the accessibility fundamentalists screw up is stressing accessibility as “the right thing” (or even the legal thing) to do. They would be much more effective if they would just drop the term “accessibility” and conduct seminars on how to “Google-ize Your web Site” so your web pages show up higher in the search results and you get a higher page ranking.
Lynx is important and accessibility is important because that’s how Google views the web and Google is god. Don’t upset her.

Designing a great site is only half the job: People need to be able to access it, too.

Source : http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/develop-culture/site-accessibility

In the UK around two million people are registered blind or visually impaired and a further four million have arm or hand difficulties. For these people, using non-standards compliant sites is sometimes an insurmountable challenge. Not yet a legal requirement, PAS 78 was created by the BSI to clarify what needs to be done to make sites accessible. Christian Hall speaks to the experts to find out how best to implement the new guidelines

The internet is an information mecca for anyone with a computer of any kind – unless you’re colour blind, lefthanded, partially sighted, have a reading disability, or any one of a long list of other conditions. Not exactly the all-inclusive paradise Berners-Lee had in mind.

In 2004 the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) undertook a study that revealed 81 per cent of sites were failing to meet basic requirements, and 45 per cent of the problems encountered by disabled users could not be attributed to explicit violations of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) checkpoints. This year, accessibility technologist Nomensa (www.nomensa.com) found that 75 per cent of the FTSE 100 sites failed to meet minimum accessibility requirements – despite their vast budgets.  

It became clear to the DRC that although existing web accessibility guidelines were good, they weren’t having the impact that was hoped for. The remedy was the PAS 78: Guide to Good Practice in Commissioning Accessible Websites – essentially a compilation of new guidelines that make existing principles crystal clear.

The DRC estimates that there are around 6.8 million disabled people in the UK (19 per cent of the population), and when you consider most will be web users, that’s a huge amount of visitors who’ll be turned off by a poorly accessible site. Making accessible sites isn’t just about catering for disabled visitors, though, it’s about tweaking your site to make it as easy as possible for everyone to get the information they want. Accessibility isn’t just about catering to the vision-impaired either; some users may also have movement problems, navigating sites using only the keyboard.

Designing web sites for those with disabilities shouldn’t be seen as a restriction of your creative development plans. “In fact, limitations should allow you to become more creative, stretching the imagination to cover more aspects,” says Iain Scott, creative director at digital agency Indigo New Media (www.indigonewmedia.net). “This ultimately creates a site that looks fantastic, whilst also working perfectly.”

There are lots of added benefits to making your web site more accessibile. It also helps people who have older browsers (which possibly won’t have JavaScript installed or Fl ash installed), by including simpler, more compressed and efficient code, and thus enabling different technologies to interpret HTML better, as well as making it much faster to download.

Designing sites with disabled people in mind can enable developers to be more creative, innovative and it can inspire new ideas about ways to get content from the web to the user. A good example is Rightjob4you.co.uk, a site that’s dedicated to getting disabled people back into work. The layout, keyboard navigation and real human dictation all contribute to accessibility.

So why are so many sites still inaccessible for disabled users? “First, a lot of people’s attitude to disability sucks,” says designer Richard Quick (www.richardquickdesign.com). “People have a preconception that accessible sites need to look rubbish. Because of this, a lot of businesses are put off because they want something beautiful.”

Then there’s the time issue. Making a site accessible isn’t a five minute job, but the perception that it’s a huge pain is largely a result of the corporate world being out of touch. It’s time to do it right, and the latest guidelines do the best job, yet, of spelling out exactly what you need to do.

Guiding principles

PAS 78 is the new buzzword in web accessibility, but fundamentally, there’s nothing revolutionary about the guidelines. They’re a combination of existing best practices that ensure accessibility is easier to implement.

Julie Howell, digital policy development manager at the RNIB (www.rnib.org.uk) and technical author of PAS 78, says that when the web was conceived it was supposed to be accessible to everyone, and now it’s time to enforce that vision.

“Tim Berners-Lee’s vision was that the web would remain accessible, [with] access for everyone regardless of disability. However, lack of regulation and the speed of innovation meant this ideal was all but forgotten by the design community.” PAS 78 recommends that web designers uphold the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and other W3C recommendations. It also encourages designers to adhere to accessibility guidelines published by the relevant software developers when using non- W3C technologies, such as PDF and Fl ash. In fact, it’s the most complete guide to producing an accessible web site ever produced.

Getting clarity

PAS 78 is useful for web site commissioners and developers alike. It doesn’t explain how to build accessible sites (which is something dealt with in detail by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). Instead, it explains how to assure quality in the development of accessible web sites. “As WCAGs move to version 2.0, they’re becoming less proscriptive in how to build accessible sites,” says Gerred Blyth, head of usability consulting at Amberlight (www.amber-light.co.uk). “The world of accessibility suffers from a lot of poor understanding and misguidance,” adds Blyth. “PAS 78 is about as consensual as a document comes in this field. It simply lays out the steps to guarantee quality, rather than the code it takes to make an accessible build. For this reason, it’s more timeless than any other accessibility guidance.”

So why is PAS 78 so helpful? The WAI published a set of WCAG guidelines in 1999 (with a number of updates since), that aim to tell designers how best to build accessible sites, but they can be difficult to interpret – PAS 78 bridges the gap. It shows readers how disabled people use web sites, how to define an accessibility policy and how to make engaging designs.

PAS 78 consists of six key areas: accessibility guidance on building, commissioning, developing and maintaining a site; accessibility policy; Web Accessibility Initiative guidance; how to involve disabled people in development; conformance checking; and additional accessibility provision, which can help your site go beyond the accessible standard.

Breaking barriers

Although not yet law, PAS 78 goes the furthest in terms of acting as an agenda by which legal requirements may one day be set, and could be used in court cases. Struan Robertson, editor of legal site Out-law.com, says courts will attach weight to formal guidance to PAS 78 as it’s backed by the DRC. “It will be used as evidence of best practice and, from now on, anyone commissioning a site without following PAS 78 runs a higher risk of a discrimination finding against them if their resulting site does not accommodate disabled users.”

Challenges for designers

Getting the message of accessibility across to the hard-nosed corporate types you’re designing for can be very difficult. “Although they’ll focus on the financial side of implementation, they need to be aware of the impact of even a slightly higher audience,” says Chris Rourke, managing director of User Vision (www.uservision.co.uk). “There is also the technological case that accessible sites tend to do better in search engines and will almost certainly look better on other platforms such as PDAs or Smartphones.” Many organisations don’t understand that a more accessible site is actually a better web site. It’s your job to help upsell the benefits across the board – and don’t let worries about jeopardising design get in the way.

It’s certainly possible to create a rich design with a bit of extra effort, but there are some challenges. “From a purely visual design point of view, motion graphics form probably the hardest challenge,” says Andy Budd, creative director at Clearleft (www.clearleft.com). “From a broader development point of view, the biggest headache is poor documentation and inconsistent support by the various screen readers. AJAX is big at the moment, yet few people know exactly how the screen readers interact with the browser and handle updated page content.”

To use PAS 78 correctly, though, you’ll also have to look at the WAI’s checkpoints (www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/full-checklist.html) and follow some simple rules regarding accessible design. Alternative text is a given standard in accessible design, and this involves text giving descriptions of images. Screen readers can reproduce what the text says (describing the image to a blind person), but unless the wording is accurate, alternative text is of little use. Using an asterisk or empty quotation marks for images that have no content value will tell screen reader software that the image should be ignored.

When it comes to page structure, a screen reader may use the tags to work out the structure of your page. As a result, it’s necessary to label headers, paragraphs and data tables correctly. Images can be used as headers and labelled with header tags so that they’re read as such. “Using different colours for links already visited will also prevent users following the same links repeatedly and benefit users with memory problems,” says Jules Taplin, technical director at Intercea (www.intercea.co.uk). “Similarly, a variety of colours distinguishing between sections and types of content may improve accessibility. Then again, part of your audience is colour blind, so you shouldn’t rely solely on colour association to differentiate in this way.” When combining colours, you also need to think about the contrast between text and background and whether this has an effect on legibility. And when it comes to font sizes, small is common and acceptable as long as alternatives are available.

Navigation’s what you need

Navigation is fundamental to accessibility. A link to more addresses at the end of text is unhelpful when read by a screen reader, as it gives no indication of where the link takes the user, so make them more descriptive. Additional information about a text link can be provided with a title attribute. This is useful when it isn’t clear where a link will take you or if it only appears when the mouse hovers over it. It’s also important for your users to be able to get straight to the content. In order for screen readers to skip navigation bars, ‘anchor’ images should be positioned at the start of content. Don’t forget that keyboard shortcuts provide an alternative form of navigation by adding the accesskey attribute to links. Make sure you don’t overwrite ordinary browser shortcuts by using them, though. Tabbing is a further navigation essential. Web pages can be navigated by tabbing through page links, but if poorly positioned, they can be confusing.

“As well as the WCAG, authors need to be aware of usability issues and should test their site with a wide variety of users – this is something PAS 78 takes great pains to point out,” says Clearleft’s Andy Budd. A site can never be properly accessible if it hasn’t been thoroughly tested. PAS 78 spells out the importance of testing, especially testing with real users. Section eight deals specifically with accessibility testing and maintenance: it states that all organisations, regardless of size, should ensure that those testing the site are different from those developing it, and site commissioners should test for accessibility compliance throughout the web site’s design cycle – not just at the end.

Use guinea pigs

What also makes PAS 78 so useful in testing is that it tells designers and commissioners how to create a test plan to discover the accessibility issues that might not be immediately obvious. It also tells you how to make a plan without breaking the budget.

For the site commissioner, testing is important as it reveals how content will impact upon accessibility. “If you’ve used PAS 78 and hired a developer who understands it, then you’ll probably get an accessible site, but you still need to create accessible content,” says Gordon Plant, usability consultant at User Analytics (www.useranalytics.co.uk). “Our research has shown time and time again that the way you write your text content has a huge impact on accessibility, and you get a really big return from teaching everyone who contributes how to write clearly and in an appropriate language.” WCAG 1.0 makes this point very early on: “Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site’s content”. However, this simple rule is all too often completely ignored by developers and clients.

Even if you develop a site that’s accessible, clients can poorly edit them with their CMS and potentially introduce inaccessible code, says Nick Mann, managing director of Interdirect (www.interdirect.co.uk). “As a result, it’s vital [for designers] to check their sites regularly in case problems have been introduced.” For the developer, the challenge is more about knowing when to follow the spirit, rather than the letter, of the guidelines if doing so will improve accessibility.

However you design and test, you shouldn’t be afraid of accessibility rules. They’re not there to dampen your spirits or creative freedoms, they’re there to help you make better sites. PAS 78 isn’t the be all and end all of accessibility guidance as you still need to keep up to date with new developments, but at £30 there’s never been a better set of guidelines to help you on your way to building a site that can really be used by everyone.

Source : http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/develop-culture/site-accessibility