Chapter 2: Agile Methodologies and Approaches
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Figure 2-7Accessibility and Usability
Two very important topics in modern web development involve usability and accessibility. The first,
usability , is all about making a site as easy to use as possible — and not just easy to use for you the
developer, but for the eventual user of the system. It means putting appropriate labels on buttons and
links — in the language the user can understand.It also means placing consistent global navigation on every page, and adding search features in places
that users expect to find them (and that generate search results that are easy to understand).Accessibility is about doing the best you can to make sure users with visual, auditory, cognitive, and
motor - reflex impairments can use your site. It ’ s about adding ALT tags to images, using UL lists for
navigation, using CSS divs instead of tables for layout, and adding labels to form fields. Imagine trying
to use a web site with the screen turned off, and only having a screen reader to guide you with audio
instructions — instructions it gets from the site itself!Usability and accessibility are each huge topics, but learning more about them and applying what you
learn will make you a better web developer. Two great sources of information are http://www.useit.com
(Jakob Nielsen ’ s usability site) and http://www.knowbility.org (an Austin - based accessibility consulting
non - profit organization).Once you have that figured out, it ’ s pretty easy to create a mockup of the Search Results page. You ask
her how she wants the results to show up. Should it be just like the Category view, with a name, image,
and short description for any products that come up?
“ Yes, ” Claudia says, “ but make it really clear when you ’ re showing a product or a category. ”
You take a Category view mockup and quickly use it as a model for a Search Results mockup, which
looks a lot like a Category view. You show her the results, which look like Figure 2 - 8.