Archive for Accessibility articles

Fixing the Flash Problem

published by Hannah in Accessibility | Website Design with 1 comment

Flash sites can look pretty impressive but anyone who knows about search engines would tell you that a flash site is not a good thing - no matter how good it looks. Most search engine spiders are not able to read flash sites so that in most cases the content of flash sites are not indexed at all. According to Google, Googlebot can at least extract text and links from flash sites. However, they cannot determine the structure nor context. Some of the text in flash sites are also stored as images so that they are not indexed even by Googlebot. Obviously, the best thing to do is stay away from flash as much as possible, which means a pure flash site is a stupid thing to do. This is not to say that flash is a bad thing but it if you want to stay away from its negative impacts to your site you might as well follow flash best practices such as the ones below.

• Use flash only when necessary. Never ever make a flash-only site. As much as possible do not use flash for your site’s content and navigation.
• If you already have a flash-only or flash-heavy site consider a site redesign. If you do not want to junk the existing flash-only site you might want to at least offer a non-flash version of your site.
• Make sure you use Alt text. The alt text is not only for search engines but is also useful for vissually-impaired users (screen reader users). Note: cloaking will allow you to describe the contents of the flash to search engines but it will be useless to visually-impaired users. Furthermore, you might get penalised if Google catches you doing this.
• Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) - This technology allows you to display text elements in whatever font by embedding that font in a flash element. What this means is that the textual content is still coded in HTML even if it is displayed using flash.

Today is May 9, 2008

Is your SEO strategy up to date?

The only current SEO book on the planet.

Buy the industry standard #1 ranked SEO Book. But don't take my word for it...

#1 Ranked. Everywhere.

Google Search: SEO Book (#1)

Yahoo Search: SEO Book (#1)

This is the #1 ranking SEO book on all major search engines.

The search engines love it. Thousands of webmasters have build their business using SEO Book. Learn why today.

Accessibility And SEO

published by Gary in Accessibility with 1 comment

Are you aware that if your website is accessible it is also search engine friendly? By “accessible” I don’t mean that your website should be hosted on a server and it should be accessible to all your visitors, I mean that is assumed, right? Accessibility regarding websites means that your website is accessible to people […]

Continue reading “Accessibility And SEO”

The growing importance of accessible websites

published by Gary in Accessibility with 3 comments

Do you think you don’t need to create accessible websites simply because you don’t cater to “that” kind of audience? Well, you definitely need a reality check. I’m not going to present statistics on how many physically challenged people access the Internet because again, some among you would say, “We don’t target ‘that’ kind of […]

Continue reading “The growing importance of accessible websites”