Disabilities and web stats- can anyone help??

bamme

bamme

Senior Member
Hi everyone

Okay.. I think I may have just potentially got a job that will get me into some paid work in the world of web stuff :)

A lot of the requirements within this brief I can deal with, but there are a few that Ive either never been expected to cater for - as a volunteer - which are top priority here :S

Can anyone shed any light on how to deal with:
a) Designing for those with disabilities, exactly these points:

  • "Colour blindness testing for all pages

  • ALT tags for all images
  • Tabbing order for keyboard navigation
  • Legibility of all text across a range of monitor sizes
  • Printability of all pages on the web site"
I know Jazajay posted a great one about designing for disabilities, but the thread is so long with a few sidetracks (thats what makes it even better :p ) and I cant seem to find those points.

b) Getting very detailed statistics (can this be done with analytics? :S )

"regular and reasonably thorough web site statistics, presented in numerical and in graphic form (e.g. bar charts) such as:


  • Total number of hits
  • Broken down by day of the week
  • Broken down by hour of the day
  • Broken down by page
  • Total numbers of page views
  • Broken down by day of the week
  • Broken down by hour of the day
  • Broken down by page
  • Most viewed pages
  • Total number of unique visitors
  • Broken down by day of the week
  • Broken down by hour of the day
  • Broken down by page
  • Most visited pages
  • Most popular “landing” pages
  • Any time-related statistics ,E.g. Time spent on pages by unique visitors, Broken down into sub-categories, as above"
..Thats a lotta stats..im panicking a lil bit!

Emma
 
Jaz's thread covers most of the top topics in the first post, just ignore everyone but Jaz :)
But...
colour blindness - online simulation
 Alt text - good descriptive/exact words to help with screen readers and seo
Tabbing order - personally never done this with anything but the contact form, firefox etc does it automatically
Text size - you can have different stylesheets which can be selected depending on screen res etc or the user could use the zoom button :) Most people still work for 1024x768 type size screen.
Print - you can do a custom stylesheet to allow for saving ink etc.
Harry is probably the one to talk to about multiple different stylesheets.

Second section, some of those should be covered by the webhosts stats, google analytics (I'm still looking into this in detail) I believe covers a fair bit of it and I'm pretty certain mint stats can with a few plugins although that does cost $30 iirc
 
@levi: thanks very much :) I wonder if theres a downloadable, off-topic extracted, version of jazajays post.. :D Ill go thru it and see what i can find, but I think colour blindness was one of the main problems, so thanks for the link :)

Interesting to also know someone else is exploring analytics like me :) Would you keep me posted? Maybe we could chat together about it? I havent really got much to test/look at in terms of a site with real stats..

@ralph: thanks for the link to this too, this will be interesting to watch regardless of the project anyway :)

@harry: thats actually a very good point.. i say 'alt tag' a lot.. this guy actually said 'alt text', though.. he is more clued up than me :)

I think i can handle this one! Thanks for the tips, ill get a friend to do the CMS part :)..Out of interest, if this was paid work, how much would an average designer charge? A freelance one I mean.. not a big ripoff company..
 
Hm.. im not sure if i should attach the whole thing..

its basically design a full corporate site according to brand guidelines, needs to be cross-browser accessible in every way, include payment function, function alongside a CMS, include all the points above, as well as custom data analysis and presentation.

Wow the actual brief is 3 pages long.. Im pretty sure i didnt leave anything outta that tiny paragraph though..
 
Hi Emma,

I wrote an article on the DDA and the web a while ago - you might find that useful: Disability Discrimination and the Web

For stats packages we tend to use Statcounter or Google Analytics. They are both extremely powerful. Google is great if your using pay per click advertising (adwords) as the whole thing is synced up, so you can monitor the performance of the ads. You can do some really trick things with Google Analytics and Adwords, like deliver different homepages etc to gauge which is the most successful - if you've got time and budget you can really get some qualitative feedback on the sites performance together.

I like Statcounter because it lets you look at individual users and shows what they were looking at - you can also sometimes work out which company they're from (it has an IP lookup); that's great for freaking people out when you ring and say 'Hi, you were looking at our website - we thought we'd call to see if we can help you'

You could also look at Woopra - that has an option for embedding a chat engine into the site. Which also tends to freak people out a bit!

Hope that helps.

Lewis.
 
Hay Emma.
Sorry missed this.
Right I've updated my accessibility web coding thread to explain about zoom style sheets and how to implament them, they should short out your contrast problems.

Tabbing order for keyboard navigation
Look into the tabindex attribute

Basically if you had a list of links throughout the page, not navigation think more like article headers you can apply this.

<a href="somepage" tabindex="1">Some article</a>
Some text.....
<a href="somepage" tabindex="2">Another article</a>
Some more text...
<a href="somepage" tabindex="8">The 8th article down</a>

Then when I go to tab on a page It will go to the link with tabindex="1" as it's attribute first, followed by tabindex 2, then 3 etc....

I know some big sites use it but a few accessibility experts, ppl who it is thier living and work with it day in day out, TBH suggest not to use it because of messing with how the screen readers work and in some situations it can make it harder not easier for them. Stick to numbers if you must use it as far as I know, I would advise to avoid it TBH. But if they want you to code it go with numbers over letters. I could be wrong but I'll do some research dig through some old books and let you know if I am. :)

I would say analytics was your best bet, not that accurate from my recent experiance with it, especially on SEO positions, but at least it will give you everything they need to know and are asking for, personally I would create it from scratch but unless you have the code for that already created thats very time consuming and may not be worth the budget.

I put the post number and page number for each thread next to them on the first post of the accesibility thread that way you can just go to a certain section with out having to read through them. I've put them in grey and shrank thier size. Just incase you look at the table of contents in the first post and think aww yeah thats what I am looking for. :)

Ley me know if I can be of any more help.
Jaz :)

Key:
Blue ~ XHTML
 
@Ralph: Its more for me to practice really :) Have done this a few times and occasionally it has its perks - software is covered and I've always generally been paid a little bit just to say thanks, nowehere near a full rate for this type of thing though!

@Northy: thanks very much for the link - will read after replying, and your pic has given me a beans on toast craving. need to see some cheese there though I'd say :)

@Jaz: Thanks for the reference to the post :) Thats v insightful - have seen 'zoom stylesheet' written places before but never knew what it meant, or what it was for - I now have about 7 pages of .txt notes with purely your replies in them hah!

Stick to numbers if you must use it as far as I know, I would advise to avoid it TBH. But if they want you to code it go with numbers over letters.
Click to expand...

- So tabindex is bad for screenreaders? And do you mean stick to numbers as in
Code: 
...tabindex="1"...

rather than
Code: 
..tabindex="awordorsomeletters"..
?
 
- So tabindex is bad for screenreaders? And do you mean stick to numbers as in
Click to expand...
Ignore that I may be wrong it's been a while since I read it I'll have a look through my old books and see what they say before I give you a definitive answer as I'm not 100% sure off the top of my head, I think so but i may be wrong.

For the zoom here's a site I'm working on and as I maintain it I don't have a gag order so can show it with out the worry of losing the contract.

Here's it without the zoom:
delete4.png


Same page with the Zoom CSS file applied.
delete5.png


I zoomed out to give you a bigger overview but the text and images are a lot bigger.

In fact ignore my zoom thread in my accessibility thread, I've just had my mother-in-law round and she has by far the worst eyesight of anyone I know and I went on best practices for setting them up and she still had problems reading them. I then used her as a Guinea pig and came up with a few amendments that make a massive difference. I was also in a rush when i wrote it. I'll try to update it tonight as she even finds the supermarket 1's hard to read and they follow the same conventions.

I have about 2-3 hours maybe if I can get peace and quite of work left before the latest version goes up, just checking through it now, and then I'll link to it so you can see what I mean in more detail.

Jaz
 
Yeah I was wrong ignore that they are fine to use.

There is something that can mess with screen readers but I don't use it in my everyday tool set and can't find it at the mo. Mmm...now thats going to bug me. :(
 
Ahh i see - thanks for the insight :)
It'd be good if someone had a screenreader to test it out. Someone should make a 'screenreader testing' program.

Out of interest - wheres your own site at jaz? (if i am not being too nosey :) )
 
The thunder screen reader is free to use, bare in mind it ignores title attributes where as the paid ones don't and reads aloud everything on the O/S you hover over, not just for browsers.

Screen readers are not that hard to code for use FireFox's view source as it highlights the code n that's pretty much how a basic page is read out from top to bottom, if it makes sense to you it will to a blind user, chances are it wont.

My site requires thousands upon thousands of db entries so it's taking time to populate it n at the mo I've got a bit of freelancing on which is time consuming.

My first major site was adult based but it just coin-sided with the crash and I had taken out shed loads to buy 7servers so it ended up costing me way more than it was bringing in so now mainly I do freelance for a company that doesn't employ freelancers apparently, lol, but the moneys good n the works there so....

I'll try n get the site above finished tonight, I don't get paid to maintain it and I needed some gym time last night. :)
 
OMG I just had the answer come to me about the bad tag, just in the middle of a convo about some crappy secret santa prezi someone brought for someone I work with and I came out with accesskeys, lol, my Mrs was like err...what are you on about, annnnnyyyhhhooooo.....as my brain finally found the answer tad slow TBH, but as your brain will try to work out an answer to a question you ask with out you unaware it is doing it even hours, or in this case a day later, bit like having a massive DB to search through, hence why if you want to keep ppl's attention online ask a question over saying a statement, as your users brain has to answer it therefore they spend more time on the page if they read it, but yeah don't use accesskeys.

Accesskeys, and my knowledge here may be a bit rusty TBH as I've all ways been tought to ignore them, is where you assign certain keys to a page element when these are pressed with the ALT key (on Windows) it will jump to that page or make some browser function kick in, like focusing on a search box, saves blind users having to find the link to your home page for example. If they know by pressing ALT + 1 will load the home page by default.

Now best practise for this as far as I can remember is
1 - Home page
2 - Skip to the content link (Maybe, or something similar)
4 - Set's the focus on the SEARCH box.

Not sure what 3 was and I think there was another one.

But if you want to use it it goes like this.
<a href="home" accesskey="1">Home</a>
<input type="text" name="search" accesskey="4" />

Now the reason I don't use them and why you shouldn't is because the ALT key on Windows is used to activate options with certain screen readers so by using them it can lead to a conflict of interest if you get me, so best to avoid them. But yeah that's the one you don't want to be using. :)

Jaz
Key:
Purple ~ XHTML
 
Printability of all pages on the web site"
Click to expand...
That's similar to the zoom css sheet as in you add 1 css sheet that removes redundant info via display:none, navigation that sort of thing so when it's printed it saves ink and gives the user just what they need to know.

I don't need to use them, maybe Harry or someone could give you best practise on what elements should be removed and the best way to implement it. :)
 
Hay Emma I've finally finished the site with CSS, coding and a few minor SEO, info and accessibility improvements. Stupidly overrided my IE6 CSS file with nothing in it last night so it took me a tad longer, and a lot more cursing than I thought TBF. :mad:

I know it looks like 2 sites but it is not, it's 1 with with 1, or if it's IE 2 or 3, CSS sheets applied and a bit of mod_rewriting to make the url more user friendly, except the home page zoom can't be arsed to change it would if I was getting paid. It should be obvious without me telling you how to find it. Let me know if it isn't.

I'll update the accessibility thread on how I did it and send you a PM later tonight I've just spent the last 2 hours checking both versions, and both versions with out images in IE6, IE7, IE8, FF, Saf. and Opera so I need a tad bit of a break as it was so tedious, I hate site finalization checks.

Anyhoo going to give it an hour and then do the whole lot again now it's on-line, I like to be thorough, so any issues you spot, you shouldn't, let me know that would be great. :)

&rarr; Roger Needle, window cleaners in Sutton Coldfield and Birmingham
Jaz
 
how often do you feel high readability pages should be used, and would it be alot worse to put the link in the footer?
 
To get the speed benefit check it in any browser except IE7 or IE6 as they had to get the slower version due to them not supporting the object tag.
 
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