Thursday, April 20th, 2006
Accessible Maps
Category: Accessibility
, Articles
Seth Duffey has written a piece on A List Apart all about a more accessible map.
Maps are all the rage (thanks to Google Maps) and Seth takes the position that:
Most online mapping applications do not address issues of web accessibility. For a visually impaired web user, these highly visual maps are essentially useless.
Is there a way to display text-based data on a map, keeping it accessible, useful and visually attractive? Yes: using an accessible CSS-based map in which the underlying map data is separated from the visual layout.
The article builds a nice clean CSS map, and then handles issues such as not having JS enabled.
4 rating from 24 votes
Having JS enabled hahahahahah… Its on by Default and most regular users dont know how to change that. If they turn JS off almost all sites are dead. I say if they dont have js they dont get the goodies.
Why do so many people miss the point… Anyway, great article.
I know this post is very old, but I’m just diving into a page that needs shipping info with a map. I had almost forgotten about the Alistapart article!
By the way, yes you are correct, Mario! Most sites do die when JS is disabled. And I’ll bet those are the same sites that get absolutely 0 business from the small few who have chosen to disable it. Sure, it takes extra effort to prepare for a JS-disabled user, but it’s the right thing to do, makes your site work in pretty much any situation (even on tiny cellphones), often makes it easier to manage your site in the future, and occasionally, but perhaps most importantly, gets you the sale from that lonely JS-disabled user.
Just my two cents. :-)
ajax can do such a lot a jobs better than we could before. The key is javascript i think