I was ecstatic to see visits from syr.edu in yesterday’s site stats, so I decided to take the plunge and switch out the new design I’ve been working on for designsimply.com. The new look is quite photographer-trendy with black backgrounds for photos and white for text. Check out the updated photo gallery to see some of my recent stock photography work. I am quite proud to say, this site is now WordPress-powered, and layout was achieved with valid W3C standards-based XHTML and CSS protocols. You can still reach the old portfolio until I cross it over into the new blog format and photo-friendly style. Enjoy! And thanks for visiting!!

Presentation: Page Source Order and Accessibility
Speakers: Roger Hudson and Russ Weakley
Event: OZeWAI 2005 & WSG
Links: Study, Podcast, Presentation slides
Date: Friday, December 9, 2005

Restructuring page source order has become a recent phenomenon due to CSS layouts that allow developers to create visual presentation using stylesheets that break out of rigid inline, structurally ordered html. Separating presentation from content leads to this question: is placing content first more accessible?

Roger Hudson and Russ Weakley set out to answer three questions in their presentation, “Page Source Order and Accessibility”:

• Is source order important for screen reader users?
• Are skip links a waste of time?
• What are structural labels and do they help?

The study offers up user expectations and observed behavior of screen reader users and text browser users. The conclusions (or recommendations) that result are interesting and not necessarily what the average web developer might expect.

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