If you are adding movie or animation you can synchronize equivalent alternatives like caption or auditory description of those visual tracks. The use of the markup is also important. By misusing markup for presentation effect like table for layout or header to change font size makes the page difficult to navigate with specialized software. It also makes it difficult to render a page if you construct what looks like a table of data with an HTML PRE element. Content developers should be aware that using these cause accessibility problems and must ensure formatting effects taking into consideration accessibility to all users.

However they should ensure that they do not sacrifice appropriate markup if a certain browser does not support it correctly. Using CSS helps control layout and presentation.

It is necessary to ensure that the pages with new technologies transform gracefully. So design the page such that it can be read without style sheets. Even if style sheets are turned off or not supported ensure that you organize content logically that helps render it in a meaningful order. Dynamic content equivalents should be changed when dynamic content changes. Ensure that pages do not become useless when scripts, applets etc are not supported. If this is not possible provide equivalent alternatives. It is very important to remember that some people with cognitive or visual disabilities may not be able to read moving text or blinking text, ensure that you provide auto updating objects that may be paused or stopped. Provide device independent access. It means that the user may interact with user agent or document with a preferred input and output device like mouse, keyboard, voice, head wand etc. You can provide client side image maps instead of server side image maps. For scripts too provide logical event handlers rather than device dependent event handler.

Keep in mind to make use of the interim solutions so that assistive technologies and old browsers also operate correctly. There are several W3C guidelines and technologies that you can make use of to make your site accessible which results in graceful transformation of your page to an alternative version.

Peter Brittain
Slinky Digital

As you can see, using CSS in Web Page Layouts can be very important in web design and development. They can help in creating a special web theme as a main layout that will serve your website. Hence, by using CSS, you won’t have to worry about changing the layout properties of each page, but rather you can just change the properties of CSS. This way, the change will be replicated across all of the web pages. This can be a great way to save time and save your efforts in designing a big website. Some of the advantages of using Cascade Style Sheets or CSS include:

1. You can create a one master style sheet with CSS and you can apply this master layout to each page that you will have in your website. For example, you can have the company logo, your headers and all common elements included in this master CSS file and thus each time you add a web page to your website you can have it ready in seconds.

2. Anytime you have to make a change in the total layout of your web page; you can easily just change the CSS file and replicate the change throughput your whole website.

3. By using Cascade Styled Sheets, you can reduce the bandwidth that will be used up by your website as file sizes in your web page will become much more smaller.

4. You have much more increased flexibility in your web page designs when you use CSS. You can easily create more complex designs instead of using the classic methods.

5. If you have to use tables, using CSS will empower you to create more professional websites with ease.

6. You can save time and effort with CSS in your web design.

7. If you have to place multimedia files in your website, you can use CSS to define their initial start up properties such as the size of the Windows Media Player window etc.

So, as it can be seen, using CSS can be a great benefit in web page design. Of course, it won’t be possible for novice users to use this feature; however for professional web designers using Cascade Styled Sheets can be a very important advantage. Almost all types of web sites can be easily designed by using CSS in your web page and it will also allow for a greater and more dynamic development of your website.

Peter Brittain
Perth Digital Agency