26 Chapter 2 – Designing for a Variety of DisplaysAlternative Displays
Web Design in a Nutshell, eMatter Edition- A set of controls for the audio rendering of web-delivered information.
- Improved navigation devices such as the ability to add numbered markers
throughout a document for orientation purposes.
Where to Learn More
The following resources will help you get started designing accessible pages:
The Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C)
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
This is the official site of the WAI. It is a good starting point for exploration as
it contains a number of excellent links to accessibility-related resources.
Webable! (from the Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation)
http://www.yuri.org/webable/
This is an excellent resource of articles and HTML authoring guidelines. It is
the web-specific arm of the Yuri Rubinsky Insight Foundation, which aims to
increase access to technology for people with disabilities.Alternative Displays
The Web isn’t just for personal computers anymore! Web browsers are increas-
ingly making their way into our living rooms, briefcases, and cars, in the form of
WebTV, handheld PDA devices, and even cellular phones. These extra-small
displays introduce new design concerns.WebTV
WebTV, a device that turns an ordinary television and phone line into a web
browser, hit the market in 1996 and is experiencing a slow but steady growth in
market share. As of this writing, it is barely a blip on the radar screen of overall
browser usage, but because numbers are increasing some developers are taking its
special requirements into consideration. Some sites are being developed specifi-
cally for WebTV.
WebTV uses a television rather than a monitor as a display device. The live space
in the WebTV browser is a scant 544×378 pixels. The browser permits vertical
paging down, but not horizontal scrolling, so wider graphics will be partially
obscured and inaccessible. Principles for designing legible television graphics
apply, such as the use of light text on dark backgrounds rather than vice versa and
the avoidance of any elements less than 2 pixels in width.
WebTV publishes a site with guidelines for web developers called Primetime. For
more detailed information on the special requirements of WebTV, visithttp://www.
webtv.net/primetime/.Hand-Held Devices
The increased popularity and usefulness of the Web combined with the growing
reliance on hand-held communications devices such as palm-top computers,