Web design must be pretty high up the leader board in terms of the industry with the most acronyms and abbreviations. So it’s great to know we have a new one; POSH or Plain Old Semantic HTML has been coined with the intention to make semantic HTML cool and interesting again. The gripe is that the web design community is getting really excited about AJAX and Microformats but Plain Old Semantic HTML hasn’t been invited to the party.
With the advent of Web 2.0 and AJAX the way in which users interact with web pages has changed. Techniques such as AJAX mean that pages can update without having to be refreshed. Whilst this has been a great asset to web design and has really catapulted the industry forward in terms of user experience one area has definitely suffered and that is Web Accessibility.
sIFR or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement is a web design technique used on the Enovate Design website to provide the green headings at the top of each page. It’s an extremely useful technique in any web designer’s arsenal.
Contrary to popular belief some interesting research on page source order has concluded that screen reader and text browser users prefer to see a sites main navigation before the main content of the page:
There appears to be little evidence to support the view that screen reader users would prefer to have the content presented first, or find sites easier to use when this occurs.