Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [149]
WCAG offers multiple tools for testing contrast on your website and pages. I also recommend using a program to simulate what your website/advertising looks like to someone who is color blind. It is always helpful to understand and adjust to ensure that your message and calls to action are clear. Viewing this will help not only those who have color blindness but all of your website visitors, because contrast is an element that people rely on to find important information.
Designing for Color Blindness
Most color blindness takes the form of red-green confusion, while the minor forms are mostly blue-yellow confusion. Although most websites will not create large obstacles, communicating information or instructions through graphics or color codes that rely on these colors or the difference of colors will cause confusion.
A great resource for understanding how your web pages would appear to those with color blindness is Vischeck (www.vischeck.com). Any obvious problems will become apparent. If you would like to explore further, Lighthouse International (www.lighthouse.org) provides designers with color-blindness web color charts and examples. There are diagrams that show how those with color blindness perceive web-safe colors.
Here are some important design recommendations:
Never make color the single visual cue; use font sizes to assist emphasis.
If red, green, or blue is being used as a font color for emphasis, another cue should be used, such as an underline or bold attribute.
Use effective color contrast in web pages and presentation materials (PowerPoint!).
Avoid fonts that are too decorative. Script fonts used online are notoriously difficult to read.
Label graphics clearly so that users do not have to rely solely on color keys.
Use descriptive text near graphics, such as a caption, as well as the alt attribute images to explain the purpose of the image.
Using these elements will also create better methods for the search engines to use the information on the page. Search engines can read the color instructions in the HTML but cannot use it as a basis for judging graphic elements. Because more information is added to explain graphics and highlight specific areas of text, this will also help in naturally implementing keywords to target your specific business or venture to the search engines. It will also go far in assisting users to understand your site and your purpose.
Thursday: Create Accessible PDFs
An important component of Internet marketing is PDF files. Portable Document Format (PDF) allows additional information to be downloaded to the visitor’s computer or viewed on mobile devices, regardless of operating system or platform. This is an excellent way to provide sell sheets, product information, and white papers to the visitor. Search engines are able to index the content within most PDFs, and the ones that do well in search engines will also tend to do well for the assistive technology visitor. PDF documents can be created using a tagged structure, like a web page, which allows assistive technology to provide a document structure and information hierarchy, which the search engines need as well. (However, PDF documents do pose a few marketing problems, as discussed in the “PDF Marketing Obstacles” sidebar.)
PDF Marketing Obstacles
In addition to accessibility problems, PDFs can also pose general marketing obstacles. The marketing problem arises from the expectations of users, especially when they expect a web page but instead get a PDF.
PDFs tend to rank very well in search engines. As a result, many users will