this is justwebcontent.com

Sometimes you could almost believe in gremlins, the evil little creatures Second World War airmen used to blame for errors which cropped up inexplicably from time to time.

Every so often something breaks on a web site like JWC. It happened again “recently”: I can’t be more specific because I only noticed it this morning when I went to use one of the site content tools, the Unicode Converter: type in characters and it converts them to their unicode, hexadecimal or decimal NCR equivalent.

Only it didn’t. Type in something and the only conversion it made was to Unicode UTF-8. There were no error numbers, no warning messages. It just didn’t work. I spent an hour poring over the PHP but couldn’t find the error. Eventually, I went back to square one and copied the code afresh from sceneonthe.net, the web partnership where we originally developed it.

The content tool is back but I’m still none the wiser as to how it went wrong.

Why You Should

Broken pages are a content manager’s nightmare. They may be the result of a programming error or code innocently altered by authorised site admins, or they may be the result of something more sinister. Then there are dead hot links caused by unexpected updates and the rest.

Errors are bad for SEO; they imply lack of attention to detail or even lack of updates and the least updated sites are dead ones. So part of your routine as content manager must be in finding — and fixing — broken stuff, perhaps with a link-check program or browser plug-in or indeed some outside assistance.

Users of TIME’s web site were always pointing out broken links, or worse, broken code (there is a kind of elation when pointing out errors to organisations who should know better).

But don’t shy away from such feedback and encourage it: ask your visitors to report any errors they see. And remember that someone who has never made a mistake has never made anything.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Kevin Linfoot, pictured, suffered a motorcycle accident when he was 17 and received £1,800 compensation. He used the money to buy a half-share of a joinery business, which he sold 12 months later for £22,000. Today, Kevin is a multi-millionaire with a huge property portfolio and a £4 million home in Yorkshire (where £4 million buys quite a bit). Sounds a bit like a radio ad, doesn’t it?

But Kevin’s success is not just on paper. In fact, very little of his success can be owed to paper because he can’t read. He does all his business in his head. Kevin is one of thousands of people in Britain who suffer from dyslexia. Over the years many business “celebrities” have declared their dyslexia; among them Virgin Boss Sir Richard Branson, the CEO of Cisco Systems, John T Chambers and Ted Turner, the President of Turner Television.

Surprisingly, the web can be a good place for dyslexics … if they’re able to use a personal style sheet. This allows them to view pages in a colour and text scheme which makes reading easier: apparently, its black on yellow for most.

All the more reason then for producing web pages using semantic XHTML and CSS.

The visually impaired need more consideration than the ability to use personal style sheets. A screen reader is a software application that attempts to identify and interpret what is being displayed on the screen. This interpretation is then represented to the user with text-to-speech, sound icons, or a braille output.

The choice of screen reader is dictated by operating system and cost; one of the most widely used is JAWS which will set you back just under £1,000 (many screen reader users benefit from health service and charity funding). And like anything software-related, there are camps within screen reader users: differing priorities and strong preferences are common.

New operating systems have screen readers bundled with them; Windows Vista comes with Narrator, Mac OS X includes VoiceOver. There are also open source screen readers, such as the Linux Screen Reader for GNOME and NonVisual Desktop Access for Windows.

The visually impaired need more consideration than the ability to use personal style sheets

A screen reader’s output can be bewildering for the non-user: they “talk” extremely fast and seem to enunciate absolutely EVERYTHING. For those more skilled in their use, there is no such confusion, especially if the page is marked up correctly by the content provider.

One HTML tag which is very useful for screen reader users is the “lang” attribute. Take for example the phrase “Bonjour Monsieur”. The sighted reader would most likely read that (phonetically) as “Bonzhur Messuer” whereas an “uninstructed” screen reader would pronounce “Bonjower monsyeur”; however, “lang” tells the screen reader that this is a French language term and instructs it to pronounce correctly. A fuller description of the “lang” tag — and the languages currently supported — can be found at http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/web/tips/langtag.html.

Surprisingly, if you are curious as to what a screen reader sounds like, you’ll go a long way before you’ll find any sort of easy demonstration on the web. Alternatively, if you are running FireFox (and why wouldn’t you?) you can download an extension called FireVox which will turn your browser into a screen reader. One word of warning: as it currently stands there’s no “off-switch”, and once it’s installed FireVox almost never shuts up.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Not really a Content matter, but interesting nonetheless. It’s not just little companies that get caught out by security certificates; here’s one for Microsoft’s Office OneNote homepage.

Click to enlarge

Bookmark It

Hide Sites