Perhaps we’ve all heard that you’re suppose to avoid using tables and Flash when designing your website, but do you know why? For a good answer, you really need to look deeper than tactical benefits, and consider more fundamental questions of accessibility.
A lot of times the end-consumers of our content are not consuming the content as we assume they are. For example, nearly a third of all visitors on some web applications are now using non-desktop devices (aka mobile) to consume the content. There’s also the issue of search engines trying to parse out what your content is, which you need to facilitate if you want decent rankings. There are also a number of vision impaired consumers using screen-reader tools (e.g. JAWS, NVDA, Window Eyes) to interpret the content and translate it to audio. The government actually mandates support for these screen reasons via Section 508. A lot of major companies follow it too.
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A lot of times the end-consumers of our content are not consuming the content as we assume they are. For example, nearly a third of all visitors on some web applications are now using non-desktop devices (aka mobile) to consume the content. There’s also the issue of search engines trying to parse out what your content is, which you need to facilitate if you want decent rankings. There are also a number of vision impaired consumers using screen-reader tools (e.g. JAWS, NVDA, Window Eyes) to interpret the content and translate it to audio. The government actually mandates support for these screen reasons via Section 508. A lot of major companies follow it too.
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