Zoe Gillenwater will be presenting next month on flexible (liquid) CSS-based layouts. Zoe is author of Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS and the Design Services Manager of the UNC Highway Safety Research Center. Recently, Zoe spoke at the “Voices that Matter 2009” conference along with people like Jesse James Garrett (from Adaptive Path) and Steve Krug (author of popular usability book “Don’t Make Me Think”). You can learn more about Zoe at her blog: zomigi.com/.
Category: Accessibility (Page 2 of 2)
More often than not, we run into situations where we need to authenticate users against the UNC Onyen system. Whether it be a simple application used on an internal department network, or a very complex system that is publicly available. Onyen authentication solves the need to lock out the rest of the world but does not [easily] allow you to lock out everyone except a select number of individuals. There are ways to check if the user is part of a specific department or has a particular job function but that may be too broad for some applications.
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We have all seen them, those empty random pages that pop up when you accidentally dived into the unknown realms of a particular website – a 404 page. No one ever likes seeing these pages. To see a 404 page often means that something you were looking for is either outdated, no longer exists or resides on a page to which the link is somehow broken. What a 404 page amounts to for you, the website visitor, is equivalent to a hill of beans.
That is, up until now. Some people are finding useful and creative ways of taking your journey to the lost outer realms of their website and turning it into a creative and effective tool for helping you find your way back to where you started, or at least back to content relevant to your search. Take a look at the examples provided by Smashing Magazine and others, on creative and fun ways to take what is lost and turn it into what is found.
- Smashing Magazine / “Wanted: Your 404 Error Pages” / July 25th, 2007 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/07/25/wanted-your-404-error-pages/
- Smashing Magazine / “404 Error Pages Reloaded” / August 17th, 2007 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/17/404-error-pages-reloaded/
More Articles on 40 pages
- Martin Korner / “Error 404 – Page Found!” / August 28th, 2007
- WordPress.org – “Creating an Error 404 Page“
- fiLi’s Tech / “WordPress : Turning 404 not found random visitors to blog readers” / August 11th, 2007
- Blogtrepreneur.com / “Creating Effective 404 Error Pages for WordPress” / August 28th, 2007
Special thanks to Billy for bringing this up in the webmaster’s meeting on Thursday. It reminded me that I read the Smashing Magazine articles about a week ago and that they might be useful to some of you.
With our discussion of Google maps today, it’s a good time to reference the accessibility challenges of AJAX, DHTML, et al. Here’s Becky Gibson’s informative paper on the subject.
DHTML Accessibility
There are some excellent tools available to aid in the task of evaluating your Web pages for accessibility. While no software can do the whole job, automated checkers can flag both obvious errors and areas of potential concern, where human judgment is key. Best of all, many of these accessibility tools are free!
When should I use evaluation tools? Continue reading