Chief Delphi - Awards Criteria Question

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gigaman2003 (Post 598294)

Wrong. Good semantic HTML coding would be easily understandable by a screenreader, such as using ordered lists for navigation bars and header tags for titles. However I do feel the same way that sites should never open a new window by default, but i believe that there should be an option to. To the person who brought up the design and intent point, thats kind of right, but your first priority should be accessibility, not design. Opening and closing windows for small amounts of information like just displaying a photo is amazingly disorientating to a blind user (no joke intended with the photo and blindness thing). Just try using a screenreader to navigate your site, if you can't do it, don't expect a blind person to. You already know whats on your site, but he won't.

You are correct that accessability, ease of use, and intuitivness (spelling???) should be a major part of the design. The link to "our robot" in the above example should have read "picture of our robot". Thus a blind person would not need, or want, to click the link. *And, yes, I have worked with people who have needed screen readers*

As far as whether or not a link should open another window is still designing for intent. Informational links, where the user is expected to come back to the main page, should be done by opening another window. Whereas if the user is not expected to return to that page, the browser should not open a new window.