Flying Ziggy – Web technologies and accessibility

Access All Areas

Post author By Kate Watkiss
Post date February 2, 2022

I’ve been working with Ensemble Cymru since 2015, supporting Peryn and his team to update and look after their website. It has been really great to work with such a creative and enthusiastic organisation.

A huge part of Ensemble Cymru’s work is about bringing Welsh communities together to enjoy outstanding music, increase wellbeing and enable positive change… and that commitment extends to our website. We want to make sure that everyone can access our website so we’ve spent the past few months working on a redesigned website that has access at its heart.

domain names

Buying all versions of your domain name

Post author By Kate Watkiss
Post date April 19, 2019

Should you buy various versions of your domain name, and if so which ones?

language management wordpress

WPML versus qTranslateX – a Clear Winner?

Post author By Kate Watkiss
Post date June 15, 2017

All over the world people use multilingual websites so they can get information they want in the language they prefer. Closer to home, in Wales, a large minority of web users prefer to access content in Welsh. For this reason, many businesses and organizations in Wales provide bilingual websites giving their visitors the choice to read Welsh or English.

When building a bilingual website there are different approaches to consider depending on what the project needs.

accessibility

Accessible xhtml tables 1: scope, id, headers

Post author By Kate Watkiss
Post date March 11, 2009

I haven’t had much call for creating hard core data table in my websites as most of the web work I do is promotional websites for companies in the tourism and leisure industry. However when asked to re-write some xhtml for an online bookings system I found some of the information generated seemed to lend itself to tabular organisation.

Tags tables, WCAG2, xhtml

accessibility

Pobol Peblig website gets accessibility standard

Post author By Kate Watkiss
Post date October 6, 2008

I’m very pleased to announce that the bilingual Pobol Peblig Partnership website has been awarded the RNIB’s (Royal National Institute of the Blind) See It Right standard for web accessibility. For more information on See It Right, other audits and web accessibility visit the RNIB Web Access Centre.

Our experience of the See It Right auditing process was very positive. It challenged our perceived understanding of web accessibility and allowed us to create a fully accessible solution for our client. The following is an overview of our See It Right experience with some examples of issues we faced and how we solved them.

domain names

Your domain name: updating DNS settings and domain transfer

Post author By Kate Watkiss
Post date August 13, 2008

If you have your site redesigned or change your web hosting you will want your domain to point to the new site. This should be straightforward if you registered the domain yourself and look after your account. If someone else registered the domain for you, you might come across problems. This article explains what you need to know, gives a bit of background about domain names & the DNS, and how to go about solving any problems you come across.

accessibility

Building an Accessible Website: RNIB See it Right

Post author By Kate Watkiss
Post date June 17, 2008

A website I’ve just been working on (Pobol Peblig Partnership) is currently being audited by the RNIB under the RNIB See it Right accessibility standard. This article covers some of the things we learned through the audit process, with background information to help understand how to approach building accessible sites and then gives some practical tips and things to remember.

wordpress

Gettext: Images and Flash

Post author By Kate Watkiss
Post date October 6, 2007

Translating image replaced text

If you use CSS to replace your header text with a text based graphic remember these need translating too. By using gettext to change the lang attribute of the xhtml tag, you can then use CSS to change element background images. This gives added flexibility to wordpress plugins like polyglot and language switcher.

wordpress

A Bilingual blog

Post author By Kate Watkiss
Post date August 12, 2007

Making a blog bilingual is relatively straightforward. There are a variety of plugins available which allow you to provide your blog in two or more languages.