Better coding with Fangs
Until today I wasn't aware of the Fangs plugin for Firefox. Whilst reading an article on evaluating accessibility over at 456 Berea Street I came across the plugin.
Roger at 456 Berea Street recommends that developers use the fangs plugin to assess accessibility and I fully concur with him. What the plugin does is to give you a representation of how screen readers will see your site. I have been using the Lynx browser to try and emulate this but this is much better.
Roger writes a very thorough article on the coding methods he recommends and I recommend reading it.
For the record here’s my basic checklist:
- Never use frames
- Give all images meaningful alt text
- Don’t repeat link names in the title tag
- Validate XHTML at the W3C XHTML Validation Service
- Validate CSS at the W3C CSS Validation Service
- Avoid using tables unless strictly necessary
- Check tabbing control
- Check site on different browsers and operating systems.
- Assess site appearance without stylesheets
- Assess download speeds
- and now… Check the site in Fangs
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See Also
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Internet Explorer 7
I've been testing out the new Internet Explorer 7 Beta for a while now and I must say that most if not all of it is very good. For a start the security is much better but as a designer I can't get over the quality of the rendering. It is near Mac like in quality.