Dont make me think pdf download free

After reading it over a couple of hours and putting its ideas to work for the past five years, I can say it has done more to improve my abilities as a Web designer than any other book. In this second edition, Steve Krug adds essential ammunition for those whose bosses, clients, stakeholders, and marketing managers insist on doing the wrong thing.

If you design, write, program, own, or manage Web sites, you must read this book. Score: 3. Untuk itu, situs Anda harus lugas dan logis. Jelas maksudnya, gamblang arahnya! Apa pun istilah yang Anda gunakan—kebergunaan, kemudahan penggunaan, atau desain yang bagus—perusahaan yang mempertaruhkan peruntungan dan masa depan mereka pada situs Web muai menyadari bahwa ini adalah isu yang sangat penting.

Dan buku ini melakukannya dengan sangat cepat, halus, dan dengan humor". Potentially save thousands of dollars in website design costs by being aware of the basics.

As Steve Krug pointed out, website design services must take into account the user and website usability. Using tips from this book "Don't Make Me Think Top Things Guiding Web Usability Design ", you, the reader, will be more confident in evaluating a good design - especially when engaging website design companies to build your enticing and engaging website.

The author has provided a quick read which will bring you up to speed on what to look for in the final website design. Her chronically single status is no problem, though, since her job as an entertainment reporter affords her the opportunity to meet plenty of truly great lovers in the music industry.

When her ex-boyfriend is tragically killed in an accident, Amari starts to rethink her party-girl lifestyle. Facing forty and determined not to be the old chick in the club, she trades in her little black book for a leather-bound Bible and starts attending church.

Mandrel Ingram retired his player card when he found the Lord. After two years of celibacy and praying for God to send him his mate, he thinks he may have found her when he meets fiery, beautiful, smart Amari. He might have cause to wonder, as Amari becomes bored with their G-rated dates and starts to miss the thrill of romance in her life. When Amari interviews up-and-coming singer Apollo Rison for an article, his no-strings, live-for-moment attitude intrigues her.

Already sexually frustrated and desperate for a new adventure, Amari propositions him for a one night stand. Before long, she is burdened with guilt and torn between Mandrel, who nurtures her spiritual side and makes her a better woman, and Apollo, who feeds her creative side and provides the passion she craves.

Caught between the man she wants and the man she needs, will Amari turn to God for guidance? And despite all of the above, the absolute necessity of it, no matter its consequences. This is the main thing that makes them feel like tabs—even more than the distinctive tab shape.

BAD: No connection, no pop. Limited pop. BEST: Duck! The Internet Movie Database—owned by Amazon, and in some ways one of the best sites on the Web—makes this mistake. The buttons at the top of each page look like tabs, but they act like ordinary buttons. Amazon used a different tab color for each section of the site, and they used the same color in the other navigational elements on the page to tie them all together.

Color is great as an additional cue, but you should never rely on it as the only cue. Amazon made a point of using fairly vivid, saturated colors that are hard to miss. And since the inactive tabs were a neutral beige, there was a lot of contrast—which even color-blind users can detect—between them and the active tab. For a long time, it was the Books tab. Amazon had to create the Welcome tab so they could promote products from their other sections—not just books—on the Home page.

But they did it at the risk of alienating existing customers who still think of Amazon as primarily a bookstore and hate having to click twice to get to the Books section.

As usual, the interface problem is just a reflection of a deeper—and harder to solve—dilemma. Why the Goodfellas motif?

You want to be relying solely on the overall appearance of things, not the details. He populated each template with nonsense text and asked people to identify the various elements like the page title and the site-wide navigation simply by their appearance. Step 3 As quickly as possible, try to find and circle each item in the list below. Site ID 4. Local navigation 2. Page name 5.

Sections and subsections 6. Then compare your answers with mine, starting on page Page name The Site ID is below the navigation, and hard to spot. For instance, they moved the Site ID to the top of the page and added a search box. For instance, the Utilities went from one legible line to two illegible ones.

I also made the page name a little more prominent, and moved it flush left instead of centered. For the same reason, I moved the search button next to the search box, instead of centered below it.

The navigation, ads, promos, and content all run together. There is no list of major sections. What makes it particularly confusing is that Builder. Local navigation The only navigation that tells me where I am in Builder.

This is one of those pages that seems to keep starting over, forcing you to scroll down just to find out what it is. All I did was tighten up the top a little and try to make the content space easier to spot by adding a background to the column on the left. At the same time, I made sure that the page name was positioned so it was clearly connected to the content space.

Subsections Search Not much. Did you have trouble finding anything? Page name I rest my case. I did redo the search. This is usually handled by the persistent navigation. Most sites need to have a prominently displayed search box on the Home page. Content Search promos spotlight the newest, best, or most popular pieces of content, like top stories and hot deals.

Feature promos Feature Promos invite me to explore additional sections Feature Promos Content promos of the site or try out features like personalization and email newsletters. Home page space needs to be allocated for whatever advertising, cross- promotion, and co-branding deals have Deals been made. For some visitors, the Home page will be the only chance your site gets to create a good impression.

Everybody who has a stake in the site wants a promo or a link to their section on the Home page, and the turf battles for Home page visibility can be fierce. Unlike lower-level pages, the Home page has to appeal to everyone who visits the site, no matter how diverse their interests.

And they want good bait a large, eye-catching link and a good location above the fold. Designing a Home page inevitably involves compromise. And as the compromises are worked out and the pressure mounts to squeeze in just one more thing, some things inevitably get lost in the shuffle. What can I do here? What do they Why should I be have here? You do need to impress me, entice me, direct me, and expose me to your deals. All too often, though, no one has a vested interest in getting the main point across.

After people have Very few people will avoid a site just because they see the same seen the explana- explanation of what it is every time they go there—unless it tion once, they will takes up half the page. Think about it: Even if you know find it annoying. And by then, they may already be hopelessly confused.

But there are two important places on the page where we expect to find explicit statements of what the site is about. One of the most valuable bits of real estate is the space right next to the Site ID. Most users will probably try to guess what the site is first from the overall content of the Home page. There is also a third possibility: You can use the entire space to the right of the Site ID at the top of the page to expand on your mission. But if you do, you have to make sure that the visual cues make it clear that this whole area is a modifier for the Site ID and not a banner ad, since users will expect to see an ad in this space and are likely to ignore it.

Take Essential. Because of their novel proposition choose your own utility providers , Essential. Almost every element on the page helps explain or reinforce what the site is about.

Prominent tagline. Prominent but terse Welcome blurb. The heading Shop By 4 Department makes it clear that the point of these departments is to buy something, not just get information. The testimonial quote and the photo that draws your eye to it tells www. Keep it short—just long enough to get the point across, and no longer.

Many sites fill their Home page with their corporate mission statement that sounds like it was written by a Miss America finalist. Nothing beats a good tagline! Six to eight words seem to be long enough to convey a full thought, but short enough to absorb easily. I think Onvia realized this and added a second tagline. Saving time, money, and sanity are all clearly good things. Clever is good, but only if the cleverness helps convey—not obscure—the benefit.

But it might give some visitors the impression that BabyCenter. Fortunately, BabyCenter had the sense to add a prominent Welcome blurb that works: almost short enough to read, with a few key words in boldface to make it scannable. On sites that are built around a step-by-step process applying for a mortgage, for instance , the entry point for the process should leap out at me. Home page navigation can be unique Designers sometimes ask me how important it is for the navigation on the Home page to be the same as on the rest of the site.

For instance, if the persistent navigation is horizontal, can the Home page navigation be vertical? But not too different. The Home page often requires a very different layout from all the other pages, so it may be necessary to use horizontal instead of vertical navigation, or vice versa. The Site ID on the Home page is usually larger than in the persistent navigation, like the large sign over a store entrance, and it usually needs some empty space next to it for the tagline, which may not appear on every page.

The most important thing is to keep the section names exactly the same: the same order, the same wording, and the same grouping. It also helps to try to keep as many of the same visual cues as possible: the same typeface, colors, and capitalization.

For example, the Wildfire. One common approach is using The same pulldown menus. Somehow the fact that the list comes and goes so quickly makes it harder to read. In most cases, I think the drawbacks of pulldowns outweigh the potential benefits. The problem with promoting things on the Home page is that it works too well. Take a town pasture, for example. But the negative impact of adding an animal—its contribution to overgrazing—is shared by all, so the impact on the individual herdsman is less than —1.

The only sensible course for each herdsman is to add another animal to the herd. And another, and another—preferably before someone else does. And since each rational herdsman will reach the same conclusion, the commons is doomed.

Preserving the Home page from promotional overload requires constant vigilance, since it usually happens gradually, with the slow, inexorable addition of just…one…more…thing.

All the stakeholders need to be educated about the danger of overgrazing the Home page, and offered other methods of driving traffic, like cross-promoting from other popular pages or taking turns using the same space on the Home page. Take a quick look at each one and answer these two questions, then compare your answers with mine. Answers on page www. It was effortless, rewarding Web surfing—all wheat, no chaff. I used to take eTour out for a spin every few weeks just to get a fresh sampling of what was new out there.

I think they did a very good job conveying the point of the site by reducing their story to three short phrases and numbering them to suggest that using the site is a simple process. Their tagline "Surf the Web Without Searching" was less successful because it forced me to think about whether searching is really what makes Web surfing difficult.

Of course, eTour was luckier than most sites. Like any good carnival barker, they understood that the only thing that counts is getting people inside the tent. The Big Button works well for first-time visitors. And my fourth. So I mocked up a version where the graphics actually did tell the story. In fact, overall it just made the concept seem more complicated. But I only succeeded in proving that the page works better with them. They seem to work as a sort of visual and conceptual "glue" that helps the user make sense out of the page.

The fact that users may try to click on them is a small price to pay if the numbers make the concept clear. Productopia was10 an excellent site, but you might not know it from its Home page. The problem is a flaw in the visual hierarchy.

Because the tagline "The Source for Product Info and Advice" is tucked inside the Yahoo-style directory panel, it comes across as a description of the category list instead of the whole site.

And since the tagline is bland and lacking any detail, it fails to differentiate Productopia from all the other product advice sites and ends up sounding like every other inflated Internet claim. At first glance, the only message I get is that the site has something to do with product advice.

In reality, the site is much more powerful. For instance, when I clicked on what I thought was a promo for a Dualit 2 Slice toaster, I was shocked to find myself on a page filled with useful, thoughtful, well-written information about choosing a toaster.

There was a prominent link to the Dualit, but it was only one of nine featured toasters in three categories: Quality, Style, and Value. I have to work hard to find the crucial information: editors select products without any influence from manufacturers or advertisers.

A successful Home page has to tell me what the site is and show me where to start. Unlike most Web awards, these four are actually meaningful. Most teams end up spending a lot of precious time rehashing the same issues over and over. My father people mind them. I think there might be a problem using pulldowns on the ASP pages from our remote servers.

Rick attempts an appeal to a higher authority… So, what does I hate everybody think? Should we try using pulldowns? Two weeks later… Did we ever make a decision about pulldowns?

And, like most religious debates, they rarely result in anyone involved changing his or her point of view. Besides wasting time, these arguments create tension and erode respect among team members, and can often prevent the team from making critical decisions. Unfortunately, there are several forces at work in most Web teams that make these debates almost inevitable. The result is usually a room full of individuals with strong personal convictions about what makes for a good Web site.

They stink. We tend to think that most Web users are like us. We know there are some people out there who hate the things we love—after all, there are even some of them on our own Web team. But not sensible people. Farmers vs. Like the farmers and the cowmen in Oklahoma! Designers tend to think that most people like sites that are visually interesting because they like sites that are visually interesting.

In fact, they probably became designers because they enjoy good design; they find that it makes things more interesting and easier to understand. The result is that designers want to build sites that look great, and developers want to build sites with interesting, original, elegant features.

Farmers love fences, cowmen love the open range. This Internet version of the perennial struggle between art and commerce or perhaps farmers and cowmen vs. It came to our CEO in a dream, so we had to add it.

But behind that belief lies another one, even more insidious: the belief that most Web users are like anything. The only problem is, there is no Average User. The more you watch users carefully and listen to them articulate their intentions, motivations, and thought processes, the more you realize that their individual reactions to Web pages are based on so many variables that attempts to describe users in terms of one-dimensional likes and dislikes are futile and counter- productive.

Good design, on the other hand, takes this complexity into account. And the worst thing about the myth of the Average User is that it reinforces the idea that good Web design is largely a matter of figuring out what people like. Menus on the top work better than menus down the side. Frames, pages that scroll, etc. What works is good, integrated design that fills a need—carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.

Take the use of Flash, for example. There are some ways to design Web pages that are clearly wrong. You have to use the collective skill, experience, creativity, and common sense of the team to build some version of the thing even a crude version , then watch ordinary people carefully as they try to figure out what it is and how to use it.

Can you tell that I think testing is a good thing? The next chapter explains how to test your own site. Opinion around the office is split between two different designs; some people like the sexy one, some like the elegant one. People often test to decide which color drapes are best, only to learn that they forgot to put windows in the room. Sadly, this is how most usability testing gets done: too little, too late, and for all the wrong reasons.

Repeat after me: Focus groups are not usability tests. And the kind of research they know is focus groups. I often have to work very hard to make clients understand that what they need is usability testing, not focus groups.

Focus groups can be great for determining what your audience wants, needs, and likes—in the abstract. The kinds of things you can learn from focus groups are the things you need to learn early on, before you begin designing the site. You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works is to test it. I used to say that the best way to think about testing was that it was like travel: a broadening experience. It reminds you how different—and the same—people are, and gives you a fresh perspective on things.

But I finally realized that testing is really more like having friends visiting from out of town. Testing always works, and even the worst test with the wrong user will show you important things you can do to improve your site. I ask for a volunteer and have him try to perform a task on a site belonging to one of the other attendees. These tests last less than ten minutes, but the person whose site is being tested usually scribbbles several pages of notes.

And they always ask if they can have the recording of the test to show to their team back home. Most people assume that testing needs to be a big deal. A simple test early—while you still have time to use what you learn from it—is almost always more valuable than a sophisticated test later. Some percentage of users will resist almost any kind of change, and even apparently simple changes often turn out to have far-reaching effects, so anything you can keep from building wrong in the first place is gravy.

You make something, test it, fix it, and test it again. Teasdale Margaret Dumont and Rufus T. Firefly would insist on trying slight variations to eavesdrop in Duck Soup. Lost our lease, going-out-of-business- sale usability testing Usability testing has been around for a long time, and the basic idea is pretty simple: If you want to know whether your software or your Web site or your VCR remote control is easy enough to use, watch some people while they try to use it and note where they run into trouble.

Then fix it, and test it again. In the beginning, though, usability testing was a very expensive proposition. If testing is going to add the time. Yes, some people will be better at it than others, but the expertise. It was Science. The idea of discount usability testing was a huge step forward. In most cases, I tend to think the ideal number of users for each round of testing is three, or at most four. Testing only three users helps ensure that you will do another round soon.

Instead of written reports, nowadays I report my findings in a conference call with the entire Web team, which may last for an hour or two.

But the worst prob- lems will usually keep them from getting far enough to encounter some others. Recruit loosely and grade on a curve When people decide to test, they often spend a lot of time trying to recruit users who they think will precisely reflect their target audience—for instance, male accountants between the ages of 25 and 30 with one to three years of computer experience who have recently purchased expensive shoes.

For most sites, all you really need are people who have used the Web enough to know the basics. Instead, try to make allowances for the differences between the people you test and your audience. And in most cases, you need to be addressing novices as well as experts anyway, and if your grandmother can use it, an expert can. Everybody appreciates clarity. For instance, if your audience will be almost entirely women, then by all means test just women.

But for the other rounds, you can choose any mix. I like to offer people a little more than the going rate, since a it makes it clear that I value their opinion, and b people tend to show up on time, eager to participate. Remember, even if the session is only 30 minutes, people usually have to block out another hour for travel time. You want their first look to tell you whether they can figure out what it is from a standing start.

Most people enjoy the experience. Camcorder D powered by squirrel E is pointed interested team members H can observe. You can use the video cable to run the signal from the camcorder to a TV in another office—or even a cubicle—nearby so everyone on the development team can watch without disturbing the user.

In fact, I used to recommend not doing any video recording at all, because the tapes were almost never used and it made the whole process more complicated and expensive. In the past few years though, three things have changed: PCs have gotten much faster, disk drives have gotten much larger, and screen recording software has improved dramatically. Screen recorders like Camtasia4 run in the background on the test PC and record everything that happens on the screen and everything the user and the facilitator say in a video file you can play on the PC.

I recommend that you always use a screen recorder during user tests. Who should do the testing? Almost anyone can facilitate a usability test; all it really takes is the courage to try it. With a little practice, most people can get quite good at it. Try to choose someone who tends to be patient, calm, empathetic, a good listener, and inherently fair. Anybody who wants to. What do you test, and when do you test it? Before you even begin designing your site, you should be testing comparable sites.

They may be actual competitors, or they may be sites that are similar in style, organization, or features to what you have in mind. It will also give you a chance to develop a thick skin. Later, as you begin building parts of the site or functioning prototypes, you can begin testing key tasks on your own site. I also recommend doing what I call Cubicle tests: Whenever you build a new kind of page—particularly forms—you should print the page out and show it to the person in the next cubicle and see if they can make sense out of it.

This kind of informal testing can be very efficient, and eliminate a lot of potential problems. The site is real, but it has since been redesigned. This will help us. You may have noticed the camera. There are also some people watching the screen in another room. It simply says that we have non-disclosure agreement if required to sign.

Both your permission to record you, but that it will should be as short as only be seen by the people working on the possible and written in 7 project.

Do you have any questions before we begin? What does a attentively to what they router do, exactly? Not much. Your role here is not to come across Good. Now, roughly how many hours a week as an expert, but as a would you say you spend using the Internet, good listener.

But I like worry. The playing games sometimes. In a typical day, thinking about how she uses the Internet and to for instance, tell me what you do, at work and give you a chance to gauge at home.

Well, at the office I spend most of my time checking email. And sometimes I have to research something at work. Yahoo, I guess. I like Yahoo, and I use it all the time. And something called Snakes. What kind of snake? OK, now, finally, have you bought anything on the Internet? How do you feel about buying things on the Internet?

But now one of my neighbors is home all the time, so I can. And what have you bought? Well, I ordered a raincoat from L. Bean, and it worked out much better than I thought it would. It was actually pretty easy. OK, great. OK, I guess. At this page and tell me what you think it is, what point, I reach over and strikes you about it, and what you think you click to maximize it. Just tell me what you would click on.

I like the shade of orange, just as likely that the and I like the little picture of the sun [at next user will say that she hates this shade of the top of the page, in the eLance logo].

I have no idea. But I have no idea what any of it is. If you had to take a guess, what do you think it This user is doing a good might be? Legal, financial, creative Buying and selling services. Maybe like some kind of online Yellow Pages. Now, if you were at home, what would you click on first?

Before you click on it, I have one more I ask this question because question. I guess I thought they were telling me what the steps in the process would be. I just wanted to look around first.

Now I give her a task to perform so we can see Can you think of something you might want to whether she can use the post as a project if you were using this site? Let me think. Maybe I would good to let the user have post that. So if you were going to post the deck as a project, what would you do first? I think I saw home improvement.

From here on, I just watch while she tries to post a Fixed price, I guess. I strongly recommend that you do three or four tests in a morning and then debrief over lunch. It might seem that this would be a difficult process. Just this: The important things that you learn from usability testing usually just make sense. They tend to be obvious to anyone who watches the sessions. You just need to figure out what to try next. In basketball terms, no harm, no foul.

So half the users may look for movie listings in Lifestyles first, and the other half will look for them in Arts first. Whatever you do, half of them are going to be wrong on their first guess, but everyone will get it on their second guess, which is fine. Very often, the right solution is to take something or things away that are obscuring the meaning, rather than adding yet another distraction. These are the surprises that show up during testing where the problem and the solution were obvious to everyone the moment they saw the first user try to muddle through.

These are like found money, and you should fix them right away. Also try to implement any changes that a require almost no effort, or b require a little effort but are highly visible. In a morning, you can test three or four users, then debrief over lunch. No reports, no endless meetings. Doing it all in a morning also greatly increases the chances that most team members will make time to come and watch at least some of the sessions, which is highly desirable.

Start now. If you can fake that, the rest is easy. As it happened, the date of my flight also turned out to be the deadline for collective bargaining between the airline I was booked on and one of its unions. I searched. I browsed. I scrolled through all of their FAQ lists.

Nothing but business as usual. What strike? I might have expected to find an entire FAQ list dedicated to the topic: Is there really going to be a strike? If there is a strike, what will happen? How will I be able to rebook my flight? What will you do to help me? What was I to take away from this? Their brand—which they spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year polishing—had definitely lost some of its luster for me. Is it clear to people? Each problem we encounter on the site lowers the level of that reservoir.

Here, for example, is what my visit to the airline site might have looked like: I enter the site. I glance around the There's no mention of There's a list of five My goodwill is a little low, Home page. Releases link at the be able to find it.

I go to the About Us page. Some people have a large reservoir, some small. Some people are more suspicious by nature, or more ornery; others are inherently more patient, trusting, or optimistic. The most common things to hide are customer support phone numbers, shipping rates, and prices. The whole point of hiding support phone numbers is to try to keep users from calling, because each call costs money. It feels like an old phone sales tactic: If they can just keep you on the line long enough and keep throwing more of their marketing pitch at you, maybe they can convince you along the way.

Punishing me for not doing things your way. I should never have to think about formatting data: whether or not to put dashes in my Social Security number, spaces in my credit card number, or parentheses in my phone number. Many sites perversely insist on no spaces in credit card numbers, when the spaces actually make it much easier to get the number right. Shucking and jiving me. We're always on the lookout for faux Right. Your site looks amateurish. You can lose goodwill if your site looks sloppy, disorganized, or unprofessional, like no effort has gone into making it presentable.

Sometimes it makes business sense not to do exactly what the customer wants. For instance, uninvited pop-ups almost always annoy people to some extent. Just be sure you do it in an informed way, rather than inadvertently.

We changed the color. Most of these are just the flip side of the other list: Know the main things that people want to do on your site and make them obvious and easy. If most people are coming to your site to apply for a mortgage, nothing should get in the way of making it dead easy to apply for a mortgage. Tell me what I want to know. Save me steps wherever you can.

As usual, Amazon was the first site to do this for me. Put effort into it. Candor in these situations goes a long way to increasing goodwill. Provide me with creature comforts like printer-friendly pages. People love being able to print stories that span multiple pages with a single click, and CSS makes it relatively easy to create printer-friendly pages with little additional effort.

Make it easy to recover from errors. But where the potential for errors is unavoidable, always provide a graceful, obvious way for me to recover. When in doubt, apologize. I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat; the two will hover, spinning, inches above the ground.

With a giant buttered-cat array, a high-speed monorail could easily link New York with Chicago. When they try to learn about what they should do, whatever books or articles they pick up inevitably list the same set of reasons why they need to make their sites accessible: It makes good business sense.

People with disabilities use the Web, and they have lots of Everyone should have money to spend. Some adaptations do, like the classic example, closed captioning, which does often come in handy for people who can hear.

Imagine that. Count on it. For developers in particular, accessibility can seem like just one more complicated new thing to fit into an already impossible project schedule. What designers fear most is what I refer to as buttered cats: places where good design for people with disabilities and good design for everyone else are going to be in direct opposition. At first it looked like an ordinary sign. But something about the way it caught the light made me take a closer look, and when I did, I realized that it was ingenious.

The sign was overlaid with a thin piece of Plexiglas, and the message was embossed in Braille on the Plexiglas. Ordinarily, both the print and the Braille would have been half as large so they could both fit on the sign, but with this design each audience got the best possible experience.

It was an elegant solution. I think for some designers, though, accessibility conjures up an image something like the Vonnegut short story where the government creates equality by handicapping everyone.

A spell Use a validator like Bobby checker for to make sure your accessibility. The problem is, when they run their site through a validator, it turns out to be more like a grammar checker than a spell checker. Yes, it does find some obvious mistakes and oversights that are easy to fix, like missing alt text. After all, most designers and developers are not going to become accessibility experts. Screen readers and other adaptive technologies have to get smarter, the tools for building sites like Macromedia Dreamweaver have to make it easier to code correctly for accessibility, and the guidelines need to be improved.

For instance, think of the last time you had trouble using a Web site running into a confusing error message when you submitted a form, for instance. Now imagine trying to solve that problem without being able to see the page. But most of us have no experience at using adaptive technology, let alone watching other people use it.

Fortunately, someone has done the heavy lifting for you. Most blind users are just as impatient as most sighted users. They want to get the information they need as quickly as possible. They do not listen to every word on the page—just as sighted users do not read every word. Many set the voice to speak at an amazingly rapid rate. They listen to the first few words of a link or line of text.

If it does not seem relevant, they move quickly to the next link, next line, next heading, next paragraph. Where a sighted user might find a keyword by scanning over the entire page, a blind user may not hear that keyword if it is not at the beginning of a link or a line of text. I highly recommend that you read this article before you read anything else about accessibility. For now, you just need to get the big picture. In the beginning, everything was text. When the first visual browsers arrived, designers found that unlike desktop publishing, which gave them control of everything, HTML—which was really only intended to display research papers— gave them almost no control over anything.

Commands for styling text were crude, and it was very hard to position things precisely on a page. And even if you could, pages often looked completely different when viewed in different browsers. To wrestle back some control, designers and developers started using tables to control layout. For years, the only way to control the position of things on a Web page was to put them in tables Most pages ended up seeming like a series of Russian nesting dolls.

It was a messy world of hacks, held together with chewing gum. Several year later, CSS Zen Garden9 a single HTML page that looked completely different depending on which of the many designer-contributed style sheets you applied to it demonstrated that you could create beautiful, sophisticated designs with CSS.

A single change in a style sheet can change the appearance of an entire site, or automatically generate useful variations like printer-friendly pages. Workarounds and hacks are still required to ensure that your CSS works across all browers, but these will fall away as brower makers continue to improve their CSS support. Unlike table-based layout, with CSS you can put your content in sequential order in the source file—which is how a screen reader user will hear it—and still position things where you want them on the page.

CSS makes it easy to make your text resizable, which is enormously helpful for low-vision users and people old enough to need bifocals.

Add an alt attribute for images that screen readers should ignore, and add helpful, descriptive text for the rest. All of the Web accessibility books have very good explanations of how to do this.

Remember, not everyone can use a mouse. Be very afraid. What can I do? Here are the emails. Feel free to use them as you see fit. I offered to send you email recapping my advice to him.