Jill's Blog

To Alt Tag or To Not Alt Tag, That is the Question

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 18:50:00 GMT

For those of you unfamiliar with alt tags, alternative tags are added to the code that places an image on the web page. They are used to describe the image to someone who is blind and uses screen reader software to read the web page to them. They can also be used to add key words for search engine optimization. They don’t show on the page unless the image is not there for some reason, for example, an email before the recipient chooses to download the images. Adding alternative tags to images is a very basic and one of the easiest ways to improve accessibility to your site, but just what those alt tags should say is one of the more complicated things. I have been reading the accessibility guidelines that are spelled out on the webaim.org even that information is conflicted.

“Read More” and “Click Here” Links are not the Friends of Accessibility

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:28:00 GMT

Recently I was able to see how a blind person uses JAWS the most popular screen reader. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this technology, screen readers are software that read the content of a web page to the user. A person could use it to read the page from top to bottom and identify any links in the content as it goes. However, this is clunky and slow. Imagine how frustrating it would be to not be able to scan a page to look for the links you want, but to have to go through the content piece by piece, in order, from top to bottom

Support Tri-C Issue 4 and Support Your Community

jtimieski@sck.net — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:26:00 GMT

You may be thinking “I will never go to Tri-C or have a child who goes there, so why should I pay to support it?” A ‘Yes’ vote for issue 4, the levy for Cuyahoga Community College, is a vote for the well being of the whole Greater Cleveland community. Tri-C is the school of first tries, second chances, and last chances.

Hey! Give Me My Browser Back!

jtimieski@sck.net — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:04:00 GMT

Have you ever done anything and thought “oh, (insert expletive) I should have known better”? I did that recently when signing up for an account with one of the social media sites. I won’t say who since they are not the only ones who are guilty of this behavior.

I use Firefox as my browser and one of the things I particularly Iove about it is all the great plug-ins that are available. There are some that I now consider essential to my work doing web development, such as Firebug. The unfortunate thing about the plug-ins is that they all take up real estate in the browser window making the area that shows websites smaller. However, I am willing to sacrifice some of that for something that is going to make my life easier.