Rant Against Extensions to HTML

James F. Carter, 2003-07-26

If your web page uses non-HTML content, such as Java, Javascript, or Macromedia Flash, or if essential elements are presented only pictorially, many of your clients will not be able to see that content. Why does this happen, why should you care, and what can you do about it?

Blind people rely on software to read text on the screen to them. Thus they are aware only of material that appears as text. I do not know of any text-only browsers that can do Java or Javascript, not to mention Flash, and the visual metaphors generally used by scripting languages are inaudible to blind people.

Here's an exercise to raise your consciousness. There's a diagram and a set of links on this page presented through dowsing. I can dowse, and the page is perfectly plain to me. If you can't learn this simple skill, you need to get a life!

By creating web pages which are not accessible (or are accessible) to a significant, though often ignored, client population, you demonstrate how much concern you have for customer service. Sighted customers would do well to predict what kind of service they may get from you, by assessing how you treat less fortunate people.

Blind people are not the only clients who have trouble with nonstandard web materials.

• People with poor vision, though not blind, have trouble to read small fonts set against kewl color schemes.
  • Please at least honor the client's choice of body font and size, by not overriding it explicitly in the web page.
  • Use the CSS generic font faces Serif or Sans-Serif if that aspect is essential to your presentation; clients will set these to their preferred size and family.
  • Use H elements without explicit font sizes or overriding CSS.
  • Use styles such as <B> or <EM> for emphasis rather than overriding the body style explicitly.
  • For size changes use <SMALL> or <BIG>; or if a greater size change is absolutely necessary, use a relative size, not absolute.
• Not only visually impaired people, but people with a different screen size from your web designer will have trouble with images of all kinds. Large screens as used for graphic design, and small screens in the ubiquitous web-enabled phones and PDAs, deliver a marred version of your message unless you take care.
  • Construct important elements such as the company's name from text (that should scale to the screen size) over a nice graphical background, rather than making a picture of the company's name. Then the name appears automatically in a text-only browser, and one can select the text and paste it into a proposal or purchase order.
  • To adapt images to the actual window size, use an explicit WIDTH or HEIGHT giving a percentage (in quotes), or use your Javascript ingenuity (but see below; Javascript may be forbidden).
  • Always include ALT text for images (except spacers and other content-free material), so clients without imaging capability can display it, and when appropriate provide a LONGDESC attribute. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you need to also provide the thousand words for when the picture cannot be seen, or is too grainy on a PDA's small screen.
• People in a high security regime will refuse to enable scripting languages in their browsers. This includes knowledgeable potential investors and corporate clients, who take computer security seriously because they have something to lose. Although scripted materials can add glitz and responsiveness to a page, you should provide <NOSCRIPT> alternatives to every scripted element. For example, you might have a movie presented with Flash Player, but when that plugin is unavailable, you should have a simple slide show using client pull for the frame-to-frame transitions. Or a highly responsive dropdown link menu in Flash should be backed up by a more expensive and less functional static page of links, possibly squeezed into a frame pane, and accessible to a blind person's screen reader. The scripted material may look nice to those who can and will look at it, but showing a blank page or no links to your other clients is not good business.
• And finally, not everyone uses the market-leading web browser. If your client chooses to use a browser or operating system that you have never heard of, you should meet your client halfway by offering a strictly standards-compliant web page, expecting the unknown browser to be able to render standards-compliant material error-free.

It isn't bad to include enhancements for clients who have particular plugins, but your job is corporate communication, and you should be able to get your company's message across to all your clients.