Random Thoughts of Mike Bunton

So I attended a lunch presentation last week on web site accessibility and wanted to know your thoughts on the subject.

Do you think about accessibility when you are designing and coding?

Most principles about accessibility are fairly easy to remember for the every day coder - things like always using ALT tags for images, allowing users to skip repetitive content (i.e. menus, headers) on every page - things like that.

Here were a couple of items that I am going to take a closer look at as I go forward in my coding and I think you might find them helpful as well.

1) ensure links make sense in context and out of context - this means that as you read a sentence that contains a link, does that link make sense to where it is pointing to? The more difficult link is taking a link out of context - for example, if you have a clickable link that says ‘click here’ - that is not good. Other times coders use ‘read more’ or something similar. In context, click here probably makes sense, but out of context it does not.

2) caption or provide transcripts for media content - this one is a little more difficult but I found out that there are a number of free products that will help with this process. Probably the best benefit of transcripts for your media content is that they become searchable within your web site and also become available for search engines like Google to index as well.

While these are only two principles about web site accessibility, try some research and keep all your sites designed in a totally accessible format for all your users!

tags: General author: mike comments: 1 Comment

I am always on the lookout for free things that I can use to help me develop/design more efficiently.

Wikimedia has a great collection of icons that are free to use - check them out!

tags: Design author: mike comments: No Comments

I was working on a site for someone trying to find out why the page was displaying this error ‘Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_DNUMBER’.

After looking up a number of different references on Google and still not finding an answer that would point to an easy solution, I spent an hour going through line by line of code trying to find the problem.

Finally, I found that the eval() function for PHP was trying to display a template with variables but was generating this error and stop the page from displaying.

So I found that the problem lied in a variable that was being set had a ton of html in it and there were two quotation marks that were not being escaped.

Here is the problem code:

<DIV CLASS=googleadsovergame>
<script language=\"JavaScript\">
<!--
ctxt_ad_partner = "9999999999";
ctxt_ad_section = "99999";

Here is the fixed code:

<DIV CLASS=googleadsovergame>
<script language=\"JavaScript\">
<!--
ctxt_ad_partner = \"9999999999\";
ctxt_ad_section = \"99999\";

It was a simple fix really, but a problem that I have found is that there were no comments in the code to make it easy to find my way through the number of pages and functions until I got to the problem.

I hope that this helps you find your problem with this error!

So remember, comment your code as much as possible, those who come after you will thank you for it!

tags: PHP author: mike comments: 3 Comments