[WEB4LIB] Re: Web Site usability guidelines

[Thomas Dowling]

From: "Nancy Sosna Bohm" <plum at ulink.net>


> > > The U.S. National Cancer Institute
> >>...concentrating on usability, and they produced some guidelines that
> other
> > > web developers may find useful.
> > >
> > > http://www.usability.gov/guidelines/
> >
> > There's some good stuff in there, but if you're going to reinvent the
> > wheel, it should at least come out round in the end.
>
> Just a cursory glance at the source code shows no styles, just font tags
and
> tables. Perhaps the usability of the page itself is geered towards all
> levels of coders?


It is misleading to equate use of stylesheets with some advanced level of
coder.  Freeing beginners from deeply nested tables and proliferating font
tags is instead a big help to them.

Regardless, a page can get meet at least the priority 1 requirements in
WCAG (and therefore in Bobby) using tables and fonts till the cows come
home.  Making those tables 700 pixels wide is not a good way to get
started, though.  Putting almost the whole page inside <font size="2"> and
<font size="1"> tags is a big clue that they Don't Get It.

I appreciate the effort they put into collating sources for each of their
recommendations.  But they don't seem to extrapolate well from them.  They
identify the most common monitor size as 17", 800x600, but they don't
understand that an usable page has to work on a 500px-wide *window* within
that screen.  They don't even seem to mention the possibility of a page
without a fixed width.

They recognize the importance of not rendering fonts too small, but don't
mention that all graphical browsers put the default size in the user's
control, and don't recognize that a recommendation about paper-based point
sizes has no exact correlation to onscreen size.

As I said before, the site collects a lot of good tips into one location.
They need to think through some of their material a little more and have
their own developers apply it to their site.


Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu