Design Practices - New ways of presenting information

Web design is an art in its infancy. We have printed books and built buildings for hundreds of years. When you pick up a book or try to open a door, you rarely need to stop and think how to use the item, even if the book or the door is a hundred years old. Both the book and the door have a hinge on the side. The door has a knob or latch handle of some generally intuitive design. Depending on the type of book, you can anticipate that the book has a table of contents, page numbers and an index. You know how to use these common items because there are standard ways of implementing the technology. When a design deviates from that standard, such as an automatic sliding door, any needed instructions are generally posted prominently. Since the technology of web pages is not yet standardized, designers are still learning how to create web sites that are “user friendly” and intuitive. There are, however, several design features that have been generally accepted as standard ways of presenting information. For example, menus are generally found on the left side of the screen or across the top of the content area of the screen. Menus are often set apart from the remainder of the content with a different background color or borders. It is also considered best to establish a consistent layout on every page of the web site. If a feature on a web page needs instructions, it is an indication that the feature is not intuitive, and may require some additional consideration from the designer.

A web page starts with a blank page with very few inherent barriers to accessibility. The idea is to create the finished page without adding any additional barriers. Simple text provides the lowest hurdle to accessibility. The text can be read by a screen reader, manipulated, translated, enlarged and scrolled in a controllable fashion.  When graphics are added, text must also be added to convey the same information that is conveyed by the graphic.

Web pages are created with HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which allows information to be presented on a web page in endless variety. HTML is also extensible, allowing features to be added without causing problems for web browsers that do not support the new features. This extensibility allows the designer to add information that might be useful to certain adaptive technologies, such as a screen reader, without causing any inconvenience to users with standard web browsers.

Early versions of HTML supported tags that allow specifying the way that information is to be displayed. For example, the ‘font’ tag allows the designer to set the font size, color and style by enclosing the text within the tag. The result is that the content and the presentation are now intertwined, and any process of changing the ‘look-and-feel’ of the site requires the editing of every page on the site.

Later versions of the HTML added the ability to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that specify how the information on the pages should be displayed. This allows the designer to separate the content from the presentation. More information is available in a separate section on style sheets.

Other methods os separating content and presentation include content managment systems and web editor tools that run on desktop PCs, such as Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Contribute. Remember that these are simply tools and it is up to the web page designer to use them to create accessible pages.