Multimedia (part 6)
An area of considerable concern is use of multimedia elements. With the emergence of Flash from Macromedia a new industry was spawned. Flash offers interactive streaming graphics, animation and sound which, although cleverly optimised, still presents users with issues of download time, processor hogging and, for the weak-sighted or blind, accessibility problems. Further, until recently, there were limited ways by which the Flash object could be comfortably inserted into a standards-compliant page.
Complete websites have been and still are constructed in Flash but the technology does not lend itself easily to discovery in the search engines and it is only in the latest incarnation that serious efforts have been made to accommodate web surfers with visual or other impairments. The technology is also neither endorsed nor supported by W3C and is further hindered in that it requires viewers to have the Flash player installed on their PCs. Many users block such software.
Flash is not the only multimedia software available to developers but it is by far the more popular, especially for creation of web advertisements. JavaScript, Java applets and now Ajax applications all contribute to the growing number of interactive multimedia applications now available to the developer, few of which are not dependant on locally loaded extensions or have features which assist impaired web users.
Visitor FeedbackVisitor feedback is a frequent, almost mandatory, website requirement. At the simplest level it will involve the creation of email response links which, once selected by mouse, keyboard or other trigger, will invoke the user’s email client. More often and for instances where email may be disabled on the local PC, it is often better to provide a form which users can populate then submit to a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) program on the web server. Such feedback may not be restricted to user queries but could be a questionnaire or competition where the format of the response must be controlled and/or validated upon receipt.
A working knowledge of a server-side technology such as ASP, PHP, Perl or other language is usually required although there exist a number of ready made scripts on the Web which will meet the more generic requirements of a user enquiry form. Of course, the server must have the respective technologies installed and enabled but most will offer at least one of the three cited.
Usability Testing
Once many if not all of the site pages have been constructed the need for usability testing will arise. Indeed, limited testing would likely have already taken place as the path between vision and goal progressed. Larger, more prestigious or mission critical websites and applications will be submitted to rigorous usability testing with perhaps hundreds of testers exploring the site and its functionality.
Such testing – whether by 5 or 100 users - will exhibit weaknesses in design and implementation, or areas of navigational confusion. Problems with interactivity may come to light or disparities across browsers may be revealed. It is important the developer mark the distinction between usability challenges resulting from poor programming and those inherent in the design; from a commercial perspective the latter and their attendant revision costs would likely be borne by the client since they should have signed off the design and functionality in an earlier approval document. There will be instances where the developer must adopt responsibility for correction where, for instance, links are inconsistent or the browser’s back button fails to return users to the prior page, or core elements are only revealed below the page fold (below the bottom of the visible screen on longer pages requiring visitors to scroll down). Another common usability failure is insufficient explanatory text for a user to engage profitably with an interactive website feature, or simply omission to indicate mandatory fields on an input form.
Usability is mostly commonsense – yet only so once experience has set guidelines, and with the proliferation of new technologies, something which often must be aligned with the cultural mindset; the first remote control for video caught out many adults!
Accessibility
Like usability, accessibility deals with the ease of use of a website; moreover, it deals with prevention of the introduction of barriers hindering or preventing people from using a website to the full. For the purposes of this article accessibility means making best efforts to ensure the website is usable by as wide an Internet audience as possible. This means through a range of browsers on a variety of computer operating systems on a diverse range of platforms – desktop, portable, notebook, tablet handheld PCs, cell phones, satnav, etc. – whilst embracing users with disabilities or slow connection speeds.
Immediate examples of accessibility compliance are the use of ‘Alt’ text accompanying images of significance, separation of links with appropriate delimiters, scaleable text … generally, compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
