Pemaquid Communications

Late last week I surfed on over to the newly-redesigned site of a high powered Web design firm whose personnel I respect. I took a look under the hood.

I saw things that I typically see (that is to say, there were things missing). Examples:

• No h1 tag
• No skipnav for accessibility, not even a simple, modest one

How is it that such things get omitted from the architecture of sites whose people should know better? I have my theories.

Accessibility is not a primary goal for most high-end Web design firms. The goal of most of these sites is to sell the graphic design capabilities, the voice of the copywriters, and the background of the company principals. The audience of such a site is typically a creative director at an agency or the marketing director at a large company. These folks have hi-res monitors and generally don’t have visual or other physical disabilities.

Requirements for accessible design and semantic markup create overhead. I suspect that many creative firms would rather not take the time to be problem solvers when it comes to accessibility. Building in a high degree of accessibility while also preserving a design concept can be challenging, though at the upper echelons of the Web design world I would have thought that in 2009 these types of design considerations would be non-issues.

We can do better, people

When I got involved in the Web I quickly noticed that what’s required to design sites (write code) is an intrinsically difficult bridge for many graphic designers to cross. Just the other day, I talked to the principal at a Portland design firm. When I asked her about how her company goes about building Web sites, here is what she said:

I hate building Web sites. Hate it, hate it, hate it. When I create a brochure, I know exactly how it will look. On the Web, it might look different depending on the browser, the screen size, the color temperature of the monitor…

I’ve heard other agency principals beat the same drum.

Here’s the thing: the issues mentioned above are all technical issues. They are not design issues.

Still, if you pitch yourself as a top-flight Web design firm, you ought to be able to demonstrate the basic principles of accessible design, semantic markup and Web standards.

It is possible to create elegant sites that meet the highest accessibility standards without compromising your design goals. I would even say it’s getting easier as browsers improve. It shouldn’t take a lot of time, and it shouldn’t be that hard.

And if it is, let Pemaquid be a problem solver for you.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 5:26 am by Rob and is filed under Accessibility, Web Design, Web Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.