Standards Make the Web a Better Place
Texturemedia is committed to following web standards in all of our projects. Web standards provide a basis for our technical innovation, and help us produce our award-winning designs on the web.
We recently completed a project for Boulder Associates. The project is basically a portfolio site that showcases their beautiful architecture. The majority of the site is rendered in Flash, providing a seamless user experience from one section of the site to another:
But what about people who do not have Flash, or who choose not to use it? What about people who are disabled, or who have other special needs? By applying relevant web standards, and by careful coding, we were able to produce a site that degrades gracefully even in the most primitive of browsers.
Lynx, for example, is a text-only browser that has been around since the beginning of the web. And while it cannot display any of the images in the portfolios, the rest of the content on the site is still perfectly accessible:
Standards compliance also works well with search engines, since most search engine indexing services are based on the same standards themselves.
It would have been easy to produce a site that was flash only, and presented the usual “you must have flash to view this site” message for anyone who didn’t have Flash. But going the extra step not only makes for a happier client, it makes that little bit of the web a better place.
Jonathan Reid, Technology
January 8th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
This blog post is funny. Lynx is used by what, 0.0000000001% of the market?
How is it even remotely relevant to brag that your sites can be viewed in it? That has absolutely nothing to do with following web standards (not to mention web best practices?).
A web development/marketing firm should be focused on delivering ROI for the client, which means delivering strategies and products that meet the needs of the vast majority of the market (”bell curve,” anyone?), and delivering tangible results (increased sales, increased conversion, increased brand awareness/impact).
Your websites can be viewed in Lynx. Whoopty-do. Can they be viewed through sunglasses, too? How about when looking through a hole cut through a cereal box? What if I stand on my head?
Sincerely yours,
Observer
January 9th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
The point isn’t that the site is viewable in Lynx. The point is that the information on the site is accessible to even the most primitive browsers (with Lynx being an example), while still providing a top-notch interactive experience for modern browsers. Accessibility, graceful degradation, and search engine friendliness are the benefits of standards compliance and industry best practices.
Part of Texturemedia’s philosophy is that you can’t provide top-notch tangible results by ignoring portions of your audience. It’s trivial for an interactive agency to produce solutions that hit the first sigma spread of the bell curve. For Texturemedia, that target is too easy. Our drive to innovate pushes us even further: we want solutions that are accessible to more than just the majority of users. We want to reach as many audiences as we can, because that increases the ROI for our clients. Plus, by creating sites that are broadly accessible, we are helping to make the web a better place. Everybody wins, even people using Lynx…or viewing our sites while standing on their heads.
January 10th, 2008 at 11:18 am
I think something that Jonathan left out, which is very important, is that there are usability laws and requirements that dictate a certain level of compliance with screen readers and text only browsers for certain industries and the entire U.S. government. These requirements dictate that websites need to be resizable for the sight-impaired, usable without JavaScript or Flash for those with impaired motor skills and other similar types of constraints.
Therefore, most usability experts agree that if your website can be viewed and navigated in Lynx, it meets the usability standards.
Some things to look into are Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Also, the US government has an entire site dedicated to usability:
http://www.usability.gov
You can also find information about web usability from Microsoft and Apple and there are a number of websites with information about screen readers and other technologies used by the blind.