Spent my day at the SCWAC with a fellow designer, and co-worker. The event was held at the South Carolina Convention Center and was put on by the good folks at access-sc.org. The speakers were great, and I’m excited to say I came out as a more knowledgeable web designer. I’ve already begun putting this knowledge into action right here in this blog entry. To explain:

For the acronym “SCWAC” above, I added a title tag that reads “S C W A C” so that a screen reader will read “S-C-W-A-C” and not “Seh-Cah-Wack”. The second bit of advice I have implemented is a “skip to main content” rather than a “skip navigation” link. The reason behind this is because though we web 2.0 savvy design geeks, and every other persons that uses the internet on a semi-regular basis would know what the term “navigation” refers to, not everyone knows that it refers to the main menu used to navigate through-out a website. Thus, by changing the it to “skip to main content” one more question mark is erased from our users’ thought process and our end result of a happy user is even more likely. Cool!

Where is this “skip to main content” link that I am referring to? Well, because my main content is readily accessible for a sighted user, I hid it from you! Sorry, but all you have to do to get to the main content is start reading. This is why I have placed my main content where it is, well it is one of the factors that went into the layout anyway.

While we are on the note of hiding things. Geniese James, senior designer at sc.gov recently returned from what must have been an amazing trip to An Event Apart Boston and had a bit of knowledge to share with me regarding good ole “display: none;”. For those of you that don’t know, “display: none;” allows a designer to “hide” an element on the screen, while keeping it in the html document. I’ve often used this to hide things. If today was yesterday, I would have hid my “skip to main content” link with “display: none;”. However, today is not yesterday. (whew!) Today, is a day in which I have been enlightened. Apparently, screen readers have gotten “smart” and have started to plunge into style sheets a bit.. thus, users of modern screen readers may actually not be able to see the content that has purposely been set to “display: none;” for sighted users but left in the xhtml specifically so that users of screen readers could still see it. So, alas.. as much as I hate to do it, I’m forced to either absolutely position the element I want to hide off screen or use negative margins or some other creative and oh so clutter-like attribute to hide elements. In today’s “skip to main content” instance I decided to go with a negative margin, for the simple reason that it seemed like the most natural, cleanest way to do it.. well besides “display: none;”. Doh! This one is going to eat at me for a while! And so is the web..

On another note, Apple multi-touch displays… ooh, how nice would it be? You may want to check this out: Video of multi-touch display demo