Signals from Mars » Accessibility http://blog.marsworks.com News and happenings on the Red Planet Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:34:41 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 The “Mega” Drop Down http://blog.marsworks.com/archives/the-mega-drop-down/ http://blog.marsworks.com/archives/the-mega-drop-down/#comments Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:18:29 +0000 Sean http://blog.marsworks.com/?p=40 I love it when the web development world comes up with a cool name for a new interface element…this one may not qualify as being all that original.  I’m starting to see these types of elements alot more often on websites and a recent post in Signal vs. Noise was my starting point for looking at this a bit further.

So…what makes a drop down “MEGA”? According to Jacob Neilsen, a Mega Drop Downs are:

 

  • Big, two-dimensional panels divided into groups of navigation options
  • Navigation choices structured through layout, typography, and (sometimes) icons
  • Everything visible at once — no scrolling
  • Vertical or horizontal form factors when activated from top navigation bars; when activated from left-hand navigation, they might appear as mega fly-outs (not shown). 
I saw this a while ago, but really like this example at Apple’s website when searching:
Hill and Knowlton’s UK website uses one that’s less visual, but starts to expand on the concept of a regular drop down menu:
Neilsen goes even further in his analysis of these menus with the following rules:
  • the menu should render within 0.1 seconds
  • the mouse should remain stationary for 0.5 seconds before displaying the menu
Fairly strict rules that most sites don’t seem to follow…and good luck making sure that a complex UI element like this will display in 0.1 seconds on all systems, but at least there are some goals for which we can attempt to attain.
]]> http://blog.marsworks.com/archives/the-mega-drop-down/feed/ 0 A site for everyone http://blog.marsworks.com/archives/a-site-for-everyone/ http://blog.marsworks.com/archives/a-site-for-everyone/#comments Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:35:20 +0000 Sean http://blog.marsworks.com/archives/a-site-for-everyone/ We’ve been building websites here at MARSWorks Inc. for many years and have faced many challenges. We’ve often struggled to decide whether or not we’d become more of a FLASH shop or stick to our current style which can best be described as “build anything and in any platform”. We’ve always believed in the philosophy of determining the situation our client and the web audience is in, and then determine the best possible tools and technologies to apply to that situation. Often, the choice of a platform or tool like FLASH poses many challenges in making the site truly accessible, or friendly to Search Engines, or people without the ability to download the FLASH plugin.

In the development of our latest website, a long overdue revamp of our corporate online presence at MARSWorks.com we decided to embark on the challenge of building a website that could use the rich and animated features of FLASH, but also be readable to those without FLASH and be fully readable to search engines or other indexing tools.

Although we’re only at the beginning of this process, we have finally managed to make this a reality, and in the process learn a great deal about trying to have the best of both worlds on a site. The site uses a single set of content data to populate both the xHTML and FLASH versions, and we do our best to detect the version of FLASH and then display the site in the proper format for each visitor.

What’s next? We’re next going to work on making sure we have proper support and display for various mobile platforms, including of course the iPhone from Apple and some popular Blackberry versions.

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