Accessibility and Web Design
You want your website to reach as many people as possible. Of course, that’s what it’s for, right? However, you may be inadvertently losing traffic and potential clients by not considering other’s abilities.
According to the American Foundation for the Blind, 25 million Americans have significant vision loss. Many people who are legally blind cannot drive a car but they can see your website with the aid of assistive technology. Some assistive technology is as simple just magnifying the text on the screen; some people use screen readers; you can read about other types of visual assistancehere.
Although much of the web is purely visual, many times we like to include video in our presentations. If someone is hearing impaired, this part of our site — sometimes a crucial part — can be completely inaccessible.
Here are a few tips to get you started on considering making your site more accessible:
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Put
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Make it easy for users to enlarge text. Us designers may get stuck on having the perfect, pretty font, and may use Flash or JPEGs to embed titles on our page. Whenever you can, use plain text that can be enlarged or otherwise easily read. And keep in mind that almost no one over the age of 40 can read 10 point fonts.
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Caption all video. If you want to use Flash, there are easy freeware tools such as Magpie to accomplish this. Also, Google/YouTube is introducing automatic captioning, although as they themselves demonstrate, it’s not an exact science. To make sure you get the text right, soon you can use their auto-timing feature, which will use a speech-to-text algorithm to caption a video using your uploaded text file. For now you’ll still have to upload a caption file, which needs timecodes to work.
Lastly, Google has a variety of accessibility resources here. Of course, these tips and resources are not an exhaustive list. The point here is to start including ideas for accessibility in your design process.
Back to GoDaddy for Domain Registration
Okay, when it comes to hosting, I don’t recommend GoDaddy — but when it comes to domain registration, I do.
I know, I know. In a previous post, I said to use DreamHost for domain registration because it’s simpler. And it is — up front. But when you want to get into things like changing the DNS Nameservers, it’s not so simple, and in fact, no so flexible. So, if someone likes someone better for domain registration than GoDaddy, let me know. I do hate all the ads and upselling, but embedded in that is a good interface for domain configuration.
In the secret laboratory at Modo
We’ve decided to write our first WordPress Plugin. It’s kind of been a fantasy for a while, but we were trying to think of something that would be useful to us *and* others, and not too complicated for our first try. We’re going to keep it’s function under wraps for now, but we hope to unveil it in the next couple of weeks. All I know is, if this thing works, it’ll save us a lot of time doing tedious stuff, meaning we can get sites up even faster, meaning they’ll be saving we can pass on to our clients.
But frankly, saving ourselves from boring tasks is our main concern.
G2 Remote | iPhoto
Do you know about Gallery Remote? It’s a handy desktop interface so that you can upload entire folders of images to a site. I use it for my personal (schatzkin.com) photography site (with Xoops, but no difference, really). I could not upkeep my site otherwise; it would take too long to upload images one by one. Another feature is that it lets you resize on the fly, en masse.
However, for Mac users, there an iPhotoToGallery plugin that will do the same thing, ‘cept smarter, faster, better.
I’m currently in the process of converting my personal site from Xoops to WP, so there’s a few wonky things on it right now.
PDF Creator
Here’s an online PDF Creator you can use to convert any type of document to a PDF. Nifty! It takes up to 1mb of data and can convert docs to any images format (TIFF, JPEG, etc.) as well.
Goodbye, fGallery — Hello, NextGEN! | WordPress Plugin
I’ve been very fond of the simplicity of fGallery and fGallery+, but lately we’ve run into several problems with it (see fGallery sorting problem and fGallery+ Table does not exist). Although I don’t mind digging around in code now and then for solutions, I decided to cut my losses and look for a gallery that works without tweaking.
Enter NextGEN. This has the simplicity of fGallery with some more robust features found in photo gallery giants like Gallery2. Plus a few really nifty features that really work, such as letting the using upload a zip file of images and automatically extracting them; and, a GUI interface for ordering your galleries, which is my favorite feature.
We have a training video here, check it out!
fGallery sorting problem | WordPress plugin
I’ve had another problem with fGallery — which I generally like, although it does seem a bit buggy — which is that the sort doesn’t seem to work on two sites I’ve created. I’ve fixed this problem by going into the code itself (*gasp!*) and put the sort order in manually, to whit:
in fim_functions.php, line 501:
return $wpdb->get_results(”SELECT * FROM $table_cat WHERE status = ‘$status’ ORDER BY $order_by $order_type”);
change to
return $wpdb->get_results(”SELECT * FROM $table_cat WHERE status = ‘$status’ ORDER BY date $order_type”);
Setting up Google Mail for your domain email (you@yourdomainname.com)
So, if you read our post about New Thoughts on Your Email, and you want to send your domain email to Google, here’s step-by-step instructions on how to do it. They’ll be a video coming along soon.
If you don’t know how to access your domain email, check out this video first.
TO START FROM SCRATCH:
1. go to Google
2. menu at upper left: click on Mail
3. create an account now — this is your Google account, NOT your Gmail account
4. fill in email you’ll be forwarding, password
5. check verification at email, click on link
6. in browser (back at Google), click on My Profile
IF YOU ALREADY HAVE A GOOGLE ACCOUNT, START HERE:
7. click on Gmail
8. sign in with username & password you just created
9. Now you’re at the Welcome to Gmail screen. Create your Gmail account.
10. Next screen: Intro to Gmail. Click on “I’m ready, show me my account.”
11. Now you’re in Gmail. On upper right of screen, click on Settings.
12. Click on 2nd tab over, which is Accounts.
13. Click on Add another mail account.
14. User name is you@yourdomainname.com,
enter your password.
POP Server: mail.yourdomainname.com
VERY IMPORTANT! DON’T CHECK Leave a copy of retrieved message on server!
DO CHECK to have your incoming messages labeled you@yourdomainname.com.
Leave all else blank.
Click Add Account.
15. Click “Yes, I want to be able to send mail as you@yourdomainname.com.” Click Next Step.
16. Click Next Step again.
17. Click “Send verification.”
18. Check email on site for verification, click on link from Gmail.
19. Back to Settings>Accounts: When I receive a message sent to one of my addresses
– click on Reply from the same address message was sent to.
20. Test it out! Send an email from site to you@yourdomainname.com and check to see if it shows up on Gmail account. If it shows up in the Spam box, open it and then click “Not Spam.”
If that works, compose from Gmail account to you@yourdomainname.com (you should see it in the drop-down menu in the From field) and make sure that comes through with the correct return address.
21. You’re done! Now your site will be blissfully free of email storage.
New Thoughts on Your Email
If you’ve set up your email under your domain name (such as yourname@yourdomain.com), then read on…
If you have your email set up this way, then what you may or may not know is that you are storing your email in the same place (aka The Server) that you store your site. So, if you get lots of email, and you like to leave it sitting around for a millennium or so, it’s eating up space you could be using for your website. This is not problem if you a generous hosting plan (like our Mucho plan, or our new Phat plan), but the question you might ask yourself is: why pay to store email when you can get it for free?
If you have a Google email (gmail) account, or don’t mind getting one, we can forward all your email there so it doesn’t live on your website server. You can send mail that says it’s from yourname@yourdomain.com, but it’ll be coming from gmail, and no one will be the wiser.
Google will give you 3 gigabytes of storage, which is basically saying “unlimited,” since you could be storing emails since Arpanet.
Yahoo Plus! has the same capabilities, but you have to pay $20/year for it. Still pretty cheap, plus their email really has unlimited storage.
So, let us know if this is something you’d like, and we can do it for you, or we’ll let you know how to do it.
fGallery+ WordPress plugin | Table does not exist
I installed fGallery+ for a client but was getting an error message that the “Table wp_fim_cat does not exist.” On the forum it said this happens occasionally, it’s a bug.
Fix: copy the SQL code from fgallery-plugin.php for all three tables, change the table names appropriately, i.e.,
as is:
$sql1 = “CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS $table_name_images (
id smallint(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
image varchar(255) default NULL,
download varchar(255) default NULL,
date datetime default NULL,
title varchar(255) default NULL,
description TEXT default NULL,
cat varchar(10) NOT NULL,
status varchar(50) default ‘include’,
PRIMARY KEY (id)
)”;
cut ‘n’ paste into phpMyadmin:
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS $wp_fim_images (
id smallint(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
image varchar(255) default NULL,
download varchar(255) default NULL,
date datetime default NULL,
title varchar(255) default NULL,
description TEXT default NULL,
cat varchar(10) NOT NULL,
status varchar(50) default ‘include’,
PRIMARY KEY (id)
)
GoDaddy, you’re so crazy!
Don’t get me wrong, I like GoDaddy just fine. But I’ve noticed that when I send some users to their site to register their domain names, they’re thrown into a panic by the constant attempts to sell, sell, sell! So, let me tell you, like I tell all my clients: ignore everything they try to sell you except the domain name and maybe, just maybe, private registration.
If you want to avoid all that mess, go to Dreamhost, a bunch of nice folks that’ll sell you a domain name without the fuss. They’re employee owned, don’t ya know.
Here’s some technical boondoggles I came across with GoDaddy hosting. Granted, this is based on my undiluted loyalty to cPanel.
-Databases are on a shared server with everybody in the world (the Godaddy world, anyway), so the database name has to be totally unique, like a password.
-the database name and username are the same
-in wp-config.php, you type in the host server given to you rather than “localhost”, i.e., h41mysql15.secureserver.net (the host server is found in the Control Panel > MySql> click on pencil icon on right)
-FTP: You need to put the Server IP address (found under Account Summary) not domain name.
-Server reads the index.php before index.html (non-standard), so cannot have an “Under Construction” page.
-While in File Manager, marketing for GoDaddy annoyingly scrolls on the right. Not the end of the world, but still…