As web users and web developers we are constantly attributing human qualities to the different actors of the Internet.  In my mind Google has always been the sexy, out of reach girl that we're constantly trying to impress.  When courting a girl there is a well defined protocol that needs to be respected.  You have to be polite, tactful, respectful (... it seems I am listening to my mom...), in any case there are rules that need be followed when your are trying to impress a girl and these rules go well beyond appearances.

As web developers we tend to forget some of the rules that need to be followed to make our sites more findable, more accessible, more secure, more maintainable... we typically only care about how do our pages look like in the common browsers without paying to much attention to the inner details.  You can have great content but if your markup sucks you will have issues when trying to conquer important actors like Google.

Last week I wrote a post on how the lack of use of web standards can affect your SEO efforts.  Lot's of small details that can really turn Google off.

At Aggiorno, the team is on a death march towards the release of V1.0 (soon... very soon...) and we need to relief some stress and at the same time try to educate more about the importance of good markup, the importance of following web standards on our daily work.  We came up with a video called "Get a Chance at Google" that enacts an encounter between a very content intensive web site with ... some issues...

Take a look at the video and share it if you like it.  Also, let us know what you think and if you have more ideas so this can become its own series!

Enjoy!

NorthTemple.com recently published a very comprehensive Accessibility Checklist that you need to follow for your web site.  The original post can be found here: NorthTemple.com : The Accessibility Checklist I V... .

The 30 items on the list (excluding the ones related to testing) can be classified in two different categories:

1) Considerations that require visual appreciation or understanding of the content to be enforced (19 items).

2) Considerations that are a property of the source code and do not require understanding of the subject matter (11 items).

The first category can be summarized as to make sure we write good content, that we have good description for things that are audiovisual and that we do not use any non accessible resource to guide the user through the navigation of the site.  In general just keep in mind who your intended audience is.

On the other hand, the second category of consideration revolves completely around what I call properties of the source code, things that are coded in a way that can or cannot be accessible.  For instance, make sure that all pages have a title, that all images have an alternate description, that form fields are ordered in the right way (tab index), that content and style are separated, etc.  All of these considerations are automatically found AND fixed by Aggiorno, and believe me, finding and fixing these things manually IS a drag and this is the reason why many web developers don't do it.

It is also quite interesting to see how one of the 4 testing considerations to certify that a page is accessible is to make sure that the page is web standards compliant.  Aha!  WEB STANDARDS!

Once again, it is clear that following web standards certainly helps in making a page accessible.  I would venture to say that making a page web standards compliant is the FIRST step that needs to be done, in fact, if you do nothing else I strongly suggest you make the page standards compliant and that you allow Aggiorno to help you in the process, you'll save tons of time.  Download Aggiorno Beta now!

Web developers and designers continually face choices about the web sites that they build. Often it seems that obtaining a desired look forces the design away from standards or making an accessible website automatically makes it “boring”. In actual fact, these are false choices, and especially with the advent of more standards-compliant browsers, it’s possible to construct fully standards-compliant Web sites with great accessibility.

We just released a white paper by Gareth Powell that addresses the main issues on how to make a page accessible.  You can find it in the following link

White Paper: Clean, crisp, accessible HTML – why not?.  Send us your comments in this thread!

Enjoy!