New Article - Site Design For The Visualy Impaired

[thejenn]

Authored by: Danielle Sahiner

Full Text: http://www.searchengineguide.com/sahiner/009957.html

A Snippet:

If you've been in the search engine optimization business for any length of time you've heard the saying that, "search engines are blind, deaf and dumb," meaning that your web site should be designed so that the spiders can easily crawl through the site's pages and determine what the site is about. In other words, in order to be highly ranked organically, a web site needs to be crawlable and have excellent content; it does not need to look pretty.

[jaairey]

Yes!!!

Everybody should try using a screen reader to look at their site! Try thunder www.screenreader.net for a free reader to see how tricky it is. I have got so frustrated on some sites that I could scream. Even with my good eyesight being able to see the site I could not navigate using the screen reader.

The article did not mention that alt text is important. This tells the non-sighted reader what the images are - from the banner to the image of the product or dog or whatever.

The ability to have scalable text is a good idea too. For example in IE which is what the majority of your viewers are going to use click on view - text size - largest. Does your text get larger? As an example, on this forum site, some text increases in size, some doesn't.

Foxfire has some good extensions for turning off various things to see how your site looks with flash etc disabled.

[youbetcha1018]

Yes, thejenn is right. Your site should be full of informative content that makes a visitor interested. You're also right in saying it doesn't have to look nice, there are some people who actually doesn't mind a good-looking ste, for them all it matters are the content and how would it help them.

[viper_one]

typically visitors won't read articles for any length of time, they might like to read H1 tags which are real big and easy

be prepared for bouncing off your site because search engines don't tell them what is in-store before they arrive

you might consider adding adsense to a site before you expect spiders, it will get google's attention faster (but it is easily removed)

try to create headlines that match the media in your articles

[bonciutoma]

Interesting information; I didn't knew that 1 of 5 people have a disability.
I always the web sites I make by following a simple rule : all the links and content has to be read with images turn off in the browser and from the index page all the other page should be reached from text links.

It's a good habit to have text links at the bottom of the page and also a text link to the site map page.

[chesa7]

I think it is going to be fascinating to see the outcome of this lawsuit against Target, and will certainly set a precedent for expecting sites to voluntarily comply with "cyberspace" ADA.