Design Update
Todays bit of work has been the development and introduction of “drawers” into the site. You can see them in action on the Links page. Drawers are basically there when there is not enough room on screen for the relevant information. In this particular circumstance I decided that I wanted the various links on the page to be in thumbnail graphic format, and given the number of links this would have led to a very cluttered page if all the thumbnails were showing simultaneously.
The introduction of drawers, through a combination of CSS and a small piece of Javascript, means that users can choose which section of the Links page they want to view, and can open and close the drawers in order to view the relevant content. In the interests of accessibility, users who have Javascript disabled on their browser (only around 4% of web users) will have all the thumbnails viewable when they open the page. This is achieved by using a small CSS file which Javascript itself loads, and which sets the thumbnails DIV to not visible. While it would have been possible to make incorporate this piece of styling into the main CSS file, that would have meant the thumbnails would have been invisible to users who did not have Javascript enabled, and would therefore have harmed the site’s accessibility.
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