Accessibility archive
Articles, examples and tutorials relating to accessible web development.
When to use display: none
If you’re interested in website accessibility best practices, you might have come across warnings against using display: none to hide content that you don’t want to appear on screen. The argument is that content hidden with display: none can’t be accessed by people using screen readers, and the recommended solution is to position the content offscreen instead using a large negative position (let’s call this the offset method). But this shouldn’t be a hard and fast rule for all situations. There are some situations for which using display: none will be acceptable.
Tools for checking website accessibility
Following on from my last post in which I mentioned screenreaders (or alternatives) that people might like to try for checking their own sites’ accessibilty, and an earlier post in which I listed the extensions I use for web development with Firefox, I thought I’d also list the different tools I use for testing website accessibility.
The web from a screenreader user’s perspective
Victor Tsaran, an engineer and Program Manager for Accessibility at Yahoo!, has put together a 27-minute video introducing screen readers and how they interact with web pages.
Dropdown low down
Dropdowns (horizontal) or flyout (vertical) menus abound on websites and come in many different flavours. They are also put together in a number of different ways, some done with javascript, some with ‘pure’ CSS and some a mixture of both.
Onfocus, background-changing, sliding door tabs
There are already several excellent articles discussing the sliding door tabs technique for creating navigation elements, so why do we need another one?
