On usability and accessibility - please display PDF links properly!
Over the last couple of months I have been working on a great number of design, usability and accessibility reports for clients of mine. Some of the sites I worked on are pretty good, and all you can recommend is maybe tightening up their call-to-actions or look at a couple of points of Section 508 to validate properly. Then there are some that need a bit more help than that. That is natural, some of the sites have been up for years and could do with a new design or will need some more development work.
But what gets me going of late is the inability of some websites to display their PDFs properly…
On Flash - SWF files can now be found and indexed
Up until a few months ago flash files used to be an absolute nightmare when it came to SEO and indexing its content for search engines. The best solution was always to have alternative content available or to use as little information as possible within a flash file of a corporate site, and about 90% of the time designers would only use flash for non-important browsing routes or as visual treats (think flash image slideshows, think flash maps but with the ability to get to a destination without using it). What good is a website that looks great but can hardly be found?
Yesterday Google announced an update to their search engines with the help of Adobe Labs. Read more about this new development after the break.
On web development - How to install FireFox 2 next to FireFox 3
With the arrival of FireFox 3 (and its record-breaking amount of downloads in its first 24h) more and more of us web architects and web developers are getting rid of their beloved FireFox 2 installation and are moving all their bookmarks, themes and extensions to version 3 of the popular browser. And rightfully so, version 3 is faster, much more stable and its updated Gecko engine is displaying your website creations in the best possible way… or is it?
I came across a couple of odd bits when developing a website - it seems like Firefox 3 is displaying a floated element’s width of 100% correctly, whereas FF2 would not fully acknoledge the width unless the element was previously set to “clear: both;” (or something along those lines, unfortunately I am still relatively new to the CSS cut-up world.
So we decided to install FireFox 2 again on the design-machines next to an existing FireFox 3 installation without causing any issues with the extensions or other settings between the browsers. I got it to work pretty much instantly on the first go, but since colleagues and friends were asking about how to get FireFox 2 to work with FireFox 3, here is a quick step-by-step guide after the break.
On Information Architecture and user-testing - Part 3 - Usability testing and Accessibility testing
Following my previous article we are now going to put our website prototype to a first test before we begin developing the website. While the functionality and navigation makes sense to us - after all, we just spent the last week(s) working on it - we need to ensure it works the same way for others as well. We understand how we get from a destination page to the product or trip we are after and finally to the enquiry page - but will anyone else do so as well?
Usability testing will reveal if the flow of the site works, and accessibility testing will ensure that our site complies to any relevant accessibility guidelines.
On Flash - Flash Player 10, Features & Rich Media Information
Adobe Labs has just released the beta of its Flash Player 10, code name “Astro”., and its time for us flash-developers to get stuck right in! Flash Player 10 introduces a number of new features and technical improvements to the exhaustive list of features and abilities of Flash 9, among them improved 3D effects and a enhanced drawing API.
For the full list of features please continue reading below the break…
Previous Articles
Welcome to WhatwasIthinking.co.uk
...my Flash Development, Information Architecture & Web Design Blog. Here you will find best practice suggestions, case studies and code snippets about anything related to Web 2.0, mashups and usability and accessibility testing. And rants.
