__/ [Els] on Monday 21 November 2005 11:07 \__
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
> [alt attributes on images]
>> PS - It can also be helpful to blind people, but this is a search engine
>> newsgroup.
>
> Making a site a good experience for blind people, helps SEO more than
> you may think. Definitely worth talking about it in a search engine
> newsgroup.
>
> Example:
> regular non-thinking webmaster's web page:
> paragraph about birds
> 'read more'
> paragraph about bees
> 'read more'
>
> 'read more' number one goes to a page about birds, 'read more' number
> two goes to a page about bees.
>
> This is probably made visibly logical to sighted viewers using IE or
> Firefox. In the blind person's browser, when tabbing from link to
> link, this person will only hear "read more", but he can't tell what
> it is that he could read more about.
>
> Now change 'read more' one to 'read more about birds' and 'read more'
> two to 'read more about bees', and the blind person is helped, and so
> is the SEO for the birds and bees pages.
Let's not neglect the value of the title attribute, which I always try to
incorporate as a surrogate for anchor text. Any invisible element does not
motivate the developer/author to embed it, whether it is abbr/acronym,
alt, title, meta or even doctype.
>Click here< is actually a common case study where the user, whether blind
or not, does not know where s/he is headed. Web design is impaired not on-
ly when it does not cater for the impaired, but also when principles of
standards-oriented design are poorly taught. I made many mistakes in the
past and only years later I come to realise that it deterred visitors as
well as search engines (hint: www.danielsorogon.com - 2001). I guess that
any design which makes /all/ visitors happy, will implicitly make search
engines happy as well.
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | "Far away from home, robots build people"
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