When is enough, enough?

[weegillis]

First off, I am not a designer or web author of any particular note. I am a hobbyist and volunteer webmaster.

Working as a development team of one, it falls upon me alone to make decisions concerning design, markup, content and accessibility. Admittedly, I am fully in favour of making our site as accessible as possible to everyone who takes the time to visit.

In the short time I have been at the helm, I have been steeped in learning (as fast as I can) everything from good coding practices to proper layout and design, and accessibility. I have concentrated on removing all Javascript, introducing CSS sheets, upgrading from HTML 4.0 and improving contrast and presentation issues that existed in the original site. Never did I expect that I would be re-creating (from the ground up) this web site, but this is how I have spent the last few months. What I run up against on a daily basis is the question of where to draw the line.

Lets look at two accessibility features which are presently confusing the heck out me:

tabindex: What is the recommended usage? Does one place a tabindex attribute in EVERY link or just the top of the list?

Ultimately, the tab key 'finds' every link eventually. What other keyboard navigation does a person use if the tabindex points to the start of a list only? How does one advance through the list without TAB, since tabbing will invariably move to the top of the next list.

Access Keys: How does one determine whether or not to use access keys? Again, my test page has probably more of these keys than can be called judicious, even though I have confined them to the Main Header Menu and to the subject menu within the content itself.

What's more, all of the keys (except the subjects: 1,2,3,4) require a Shift+Alt+letter key combination.

Furthermore, I'm at odds at to whether or not to include a viewable list of access keys or a LONGDESC or some such method to inform of the list. Presently, the list of Access Keys is contained in the <.div id="main_navigation" title="..."> of the main menu division. Probably not the best place, since the title is not accessible from the keyboard.

Being a small site, with an average of less than 25 visitors per day, one wonders if all the extra effort is really necessary. I would much rather focus on making valid XHTML pages, complete with title and alt tags, and a limited amount of graphically represented information. Speed is a factor, of course. Sensible navigation is another.

For my own part, I have taken on a very time and energy consuming role, and just want to do the best job I can within my capabilities. Some advice and guidelines for 'small site developers' would be big help.

Just sending me to W3C deosn't cut it. Someone needs to address this issue for the NON-professionals among us for whom W3C specifications are not daily fare.

Thanks in advance for any help than can offered here!

[ranjan]

What is the recommended usage?

Tabindex should be used only when you need to change the defualt tab order. eg. on a page with webforms, you might want to tab into the forms right after navigations, before you can tab into other links on the page.

Hence it depends on your site layout and your judgement.

How does one determine whether or not to use access keys?

As tabindexes are changed only in special cases, accesskeys should be added at all times.

"Standard" access key assignments?
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms...ey.html#assign

Never define ACCESSKEY bindings for:

* F - File
* B - Bookmarks
* E - Edit
* V - View
* G - Go
* T - Tools
* H - Help
* A - Favorites

Your safest bet, if you want access keys, is to bind them to numeric keys only, which has the smallest chance of conflicting with browser based keyboard shortcuts.

[Webnauts]

You better must use numbers instead of letters for AccessKeys.

More info: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/...rJun/0117.html

You can see as a sample my under construction web site: http://www.webnauts.net/css_final/index.shtml

[weegillis]

ranjan and Webnauts, you have both been a great help. I have chased down the links you have presented and learned much from the information you sent me to.

My conclusion? No tabindex's since everything on our site is straight forward and tabbing order is not affected. We have no web forms. One Access Key: Home = 9. Why '9,' you may ask? So that 'I' can have my own reserve list!!! (grins)

My other conclusion is, I believe we are doing as much as can be reasonably expected to make our site accessible. Here is what we are working toward:

1. Meaningful link terms
2. Clear alt and title tags
3. Easy navigation
4. No graphically presented information
5. No links in graphics (getting there)
6. Skip to content link at top of markup
7. Better contrast
8. More meaningful layout and organization
9. Bare minimum of Javascript
10. Close Window buttons in picture windows, with consistent solid backgrounds for easy recognition

As mentioned earlier, the most common hinderance our visitors face (locally, at least) is dial-up connection speed. I've been looking for ways to have text content fill the page while images download.

Stated earlier, accessibility is a concern of ours and we do want to do our part in making the internet easy to access. If there are any suggestions for ways to improve on our upgrade, I'm all ears.

Thanks again,

Wee Gillis

[Webnauts]

You have a serious error at line 2.
I found an extra and anyway out of place an XML declaration (<?xml ... >). It is recommended that every XML based document have one and only one XML declaration, and it should be the first line of an XML based document. But not always. In this case I recommend you you to delete the 2nd line completely,
if you are concerned in backward browser compatibility.

Must look like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

[weegillis]

Thank you for pointing that out, Webnauts.

Let's take another look at this: (dots are mine)

#1. <.!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
#2. <.?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
#3. <.html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

Some of my pages have line #2 at #1 and others at #2 as we see it, here. Both versions validate with no warnings.

There is a noticable, if not drastic difference in the behavior or IE 6.0 depending on the position of this line. I've actually never tested (or tried to validate) with the line taken out altogether; will experiment over the weekend.

My understanding is this, and I hope you or someone will guide me in my thinking:

When line #2 is in the #1 position, it sets IE 5x/6 in 'quirks' mode, meaning that IE will be more forgiving of certain non-compliant coding practices. When it is set in the #2 position, as above, IE is in 'strict' mode and adheres as best as it is able to the 'normal' NS 6+, Opera, Mozilla, Safari, &c. standards compliance.

I'm a little confused about all this, but once I started working with 'strict' mode, I found that the results were more predictible in NS and Moz. I don't have Opera, and don't own a Mac so I don't know how successfully the pages are rendering in those browsers. Mostly, I'm just winging it.

I already know that my pages are breaking in NN 4.x, and don't really know how to rectify this problem. Right now I just keep my blinders on in the hopes that time will soon be on my side and the old browsers get washed over the falls.

Not the best of attitudes, but when you're a late bloomer you are faced with these types of dilemnas. Do I spend weeks trying to retrace the outdated modes, or do I spend my time learning what is coming down the pike.

Time and energy are not on my side if I choose to do the former, not to mention I don't even have NN 4.x, so you can see where the crux hits the concrete.

Can you shed soome more light on this?

[Webnauts]

Weegillis you better avoid using the <?xml ...?> declaration, while IE 6 does not see the Doctype, and lapses into "quirks" mode.
That's why you must leave out the XML version declaration, if you want to have the best CSS support for all current browsers!

Example:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
........

[weegillis]

Roger, wilko. Will put this into effect immediately and watch for any effect it may have. Thanks for your warning, and helpful advice. o-a-o