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liga1.com gives the new EH good marks for accessibility. I actually learned this css trick from ALA which does very well with screen readers.
"The screenreader only reads the logo ALt text and the 5 main categories of the site and then it starts with the content. Fantastic! No more waiting through endless navigation links"
Christina, You should definitely write up how to built this. If you had an article on the implementation, I'd promote it to our clients as a resource for dealing with accessibility issues.
It's a question we get a lot and, since we're not designers, we don't really know how to answer it.
(I've never designed a web site in my life. In fact, it's a life goal to not design a web site. I figure I'm about half way there. I could tell a cascading style sheet from the Cascade mountain range.)
-- Jared
I have to say, Jared, most clients insist their site looks good on everything back to netscape 2.0, and css layouts only work on 4+, and best on 5. look at this site on netscape 4, I hear it's entertaining. If you've found a good way to get clients to look at their logs and then design to their audience....
As for writing it up, A List Apart has already done it for me-- in clear, down to earth language. ALA has a great series of articles on css, including Zeldman's own write up of the layout, and Mark Newhouse's wonderful practical guide. Also, Owen Briggs has set up some example layouts in his box lesson that you can grab.
CSS is, in my mind, actually simpler than table layouts, to create and maintain-- the hard part, as ever is working around the browser inconstancies.
Christina-
The new-and-improved EH may be accessible by the visually challenged... but what about those of us with normal sight??? The type on your site is now so teeny tiny that even pressing the "larger" button in my browser doesn't make it legible.
What gives?
Brenda - that's strange. The type is OK on my screen and the text size changer function on my browser works OK too. (I'm using IE5 on Win98.)
Christina, it is possible to design a site that uses CSS and looks good in browsers back to 2.0. They won't necessarily look the same in pre-CSS browsers, mind you. That was the approach I took with www.savebbc.org. It looks fine in every browser I could find, including some truly obscure ones, like a CERN line-mode client for the Mac from early 1993 (I was feeling cussed-minded the day I tested the site against browsers...). It just doesn't look the same in all of them. One of the nice things about HTML and CSS is that properly done, they degrade gracefully.