Fog of Eternity | Website design and discussion

Though recently I’ve started using the newly released (for PC) Safari browser for day to day internet viewing, I still use Firefox a great deal when actually working on internet sites. The open source nature of Firefox provides for a great number of useful add-ons that widen the scope of the browser. These add-ons are small pieces of software that can be installed and incorporated in the Firefox browser. These can certainly add functionality to any user, with add-ons that provide for easier blog posting, changing the look and feel of the browser itself, calendar additions etc. But there are also some add-ons that are of particular use when it comes to web design, and I wanted to highlight three of them.

ColorZilla is a really simple tool that does a couple of small tasks really well. Usually when you look at a website and want to extract colour information from images or other objects that aren’t part of the viewable CSS the only way to do so is to take a screenshot of the page, open it in a package such as Photoshop and find the RGB information out through the Eyedropper tool or similar. ColorZilla provides an in-browser eyedropper tool, which will give an RGB colour reading for any part of a web page. It also allows easy zooming into parts of a web page, something that can be very useful when making small CSS adjustments in regard to aligning aspects of a page, so I have the ability to check to the pixel whether the alignment is right (would that such a tool was available in Internet Explorer given its often different behaviour in regards to CSS margins and padding).

The Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer is an invaluable tool for anyone interested in Search Engine Optimisation or accessibility. Lynx is a text-only web browser and being able to see how your site looks in text-only mode is very useful. Search engine spiders such as that used by Google use similar text-only browsing modes to index web pages. A page that renders clearly and usefully in a text-only browser is going to be a page which search engine spiders will find easy to understand and to effectively index, vital for achieving good searchability. Being able to view web pages in text-only mode also gives a great guide as to how the visually impaired might experience the page if using screen reader software, an important factor in achieving the widest possible accessibility for a site.

Continuing on the accessibility theme, the Firefox Accessibility Extension is an essential tool for web design. It gives you as much feedback as you could possibly need in regards to the accessibility of any page being browsed. It can evaluate the clarity of navigation, provide information on text equivalents of images and other none-text aspects of the page, temporarily disable scripting on a page, disable CSS to show how effectively a page is structured without style information, links pages directly to CSS and HTML validation engines and also to a number of software tools that can provide more in-depth analysis and feedback on the overall accessibility of a web page. Such software can give feedback both on the standards put together by W3C and the legal requirements of the US Section 508 legislation. I’ve seen no other tool that gives such comprehensive and clear feedback on web accessibility, it really is something that cannot be ignored by a web designer.

Filed under: Accessibility, Browsers, Design by Robin Cannon

Subscribe to our RSS feed