Mercurythread » accessibility http://www.mercurythread.co.uk The personal website of Michael Briggs : Professional SEO and Internet Geek Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:31:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 Text Contrast – Website Testing Series http://www.mercurythread.co.uk/blog/text-contrast-website-testing-series/2009/03/ http://www.mercurythread.co.uk/blog/text-contrast-website-testing-series/2009/03/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:00:46 +0000 Michael http://www.mercurythread.co.uk/blog/?p=157 It’s such a simple thing but designers are not per se website designers – in the same way that SEO people are not website designers. I can’t use photoshop to save myself but its important that all designers understand the basics of a webpage and having a good contrast between text and background is hugely important. 

Why is the contrast between text and background important?

  1. Makes text easier to read – remember visitors scan content
  2. Your text sells your products to visitors
  3. Helps with accessibility
  4. SEO guys won’t complain about possibility of hidden text

Why do designers design without contrasting colours?

  1. They have nice, high resolution monitors and assume everyone gets their experience
  2. They don’t design for users (they make pretty pictures)
  3. Lose track of core goal of websites (get visitors to do something) and want to be clever

How To Test for Colour Contrast?

Its pretty easy to go and test the colour contrast you can use online tools or install a toolbar (useful for designers me thinks) – if you want to get really geeky you can test with the W3 guidelines. I generally use the tool provided by http://www.snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html there are more listed at Berea Street.

]]> http://www.mercurythread.co.uk/blog/text-contrast-website-testing-series/2009/03/feed/ 1 Checking Alt attributes – Website Testing Series http://www.mercurythread.co.uk/blog/checking-alt-attributes-website-testing-series/2009/03/ http://www.mercurythread.co.uk/blog/checking-alt-attributes-website-testing-series/2009/03/#comments Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:10:26 +0000 Michael http://www.mercurythread.co.uk/blog/?p=150 One of the cool things in CSS is the ability to add styles to elements with certain attribute values – so you can style based upon the context of an HTML element. During website testing a useful thing to do is to test and make sure that images, where appropriate, have an alt attribute.
Having a good alt attribute is not going to change your SEO performance on its own – it will going help make your website more accessible and user friendly. Good alt attributes are part of SEO housekeeping – should be done but no one really likes doing it. So before you launch a site check your pages with the following style in the sheet to place a red border round all images that have no alt attribute specified:

img[alt=””] {border:10px solid red;}

See how easy that was. One quick check and you can find the problems almost instantly – on a test site it only takes a short time to check your pages.

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