Sound systems for churches

I recently spotted this article, Sound Systems for Better Sunday Worship in UU World and notice that Oldham Unitarians have just installed a video screen.

I thought it would be a good idea to improve sound systems in our chapels and churches, so I asked if there was a fund to support this.

Apparently the Millennium Fund is still in existence and could be a source of funding support. It does cover “fittings, furniture and equipment following developmental work eg audio loop systems” Any congregation interested in making an application should contact Derek McAuley.

Reasonable contrast on web pages

For accessibility reasons, it's best to have high contrast text on a non-patterned background.

However, if you must have a fancy background, or you need a widget to turn off the styling of other people's sites, here's a neat bookmarklet that you can drag to your browser toolbar.

B on W

(via 456 Berea Street)

There are also browser add-ons for accessibility that you can get to help you test the contrast of a page.

Accessible graphics

Most people know that you must add alt text to images, for example:

<img src="http://www.blogger.com/myphoto.jpg" alt="The Nightingale Centre" />

But there are other things you need to add for full accessibility and usability.

You should set a height and width for your image (and this should be no greater than the actual height and width of the image).

<img src="http://www.blogger.com/myphoto.jpg" height="240" width="360" alt="The Nightingale Centre" />

If an image is very high resolution, it will take a while to download, so you should resize it to a smaller size in your graphics program before uploading it (don't just set a smaller height and width in your HTML).

Internet Explorer uses the alt text as a tooltip, which is actually incorrect. Firefox uses the title attribute as the tooltip text, which is correct. So, if you want the title of your image to be displayed when a Firefox user rolls his/her mouse over the image, you need to add a title attribute.

<img src="http://www.blogger.com/myphoto.jpg" height="240" width="360" alt="The Nightingale Centre" title="The Nightingale Centre" />

You should also ensure that you use the correct format for your images. JPG format should always be used for photos. PNG or GIF formats should always be used for other graphics, such as logos.

Accessible video

So you have produced a shiny new video for your website - but is it accessible?

Deaf viewers require captioning; blind users require audio descriptions, and mobility-impaired users require keyboard shortcuts for video controls.

The best free tool for making videos accessible is Media Access Generator (MAGpie) from NCAM.

Another option is to provide a transcript of your video content.

Accessible tables

If you're using a table to present information, you need to make it readable from left to right so that it won't be inaccessible to people using screen readers.

Here's an example of a good table:

Name	Phone	Email
Joe Bloggs	0208 123 4567	jbloggs@gmail.com
Ann Other	0208 234 5678	annother@gmail.com
Fred Smith	0208 345 6789	fsmith@gmail.com

Other important guidelines for accessible tables:

• Using real table headers
• Providing a summary for tables
• Accessible tables
• Content linearisation

Accessibility

Making your website accessible is very important. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the definitive guide to making your site accessible. There is also a checklist based on the guidelines produced by WebAIM.

Making your site accessible helps everyone, but especially users with visual or hearing impairments, and people with slow web connections.

A useful resource for understanding accessibility issues is Dive into accessibility, which presents a series of things you can do to make your website more accessible, and some case studies of people with disabilities.

There is also a selection of tools you can use to analyse your web pages for accessibility. These make the process very much easier - but they are no substitute for understanding accessibility and learning the basic accessibility guidelines.

Heal your church website

Whilst Heal your church website is written mainly for evangelicals, it still has lots of great articles and information.

• Five things that heal your church website
• The Seven Deadly Sins of Church WebSite Design
• The Seven Deadly Sins of Web Writing

You can also feel really really smug that Unitarian websites don't have animated spinning gold crosses, or Jesus Junk. Though we probably do have some inaccessible features like using tables for layout.

When to use PDFs

When not to use PDFs

• If the information is intended to be read online
• If another content type could be used instead, i.e. a normal HTML web-page

When to use PDFs

• When a document needs to be downloaded, read offline or printed
• If a document is more than 5 pages long. But consider whether it could be broken down into smaller sections and presented as HTML
• When attaching a document to an email
• As an additional alternative to online content - e.g. this set of tutorials could also be provided as a single PDF document
• When formatting needs to be preserved - e.g. a PowerPoint presentation
• Instead of Microsoft Office documents. But HTML is better most of the time
• See the definitive list of when to use PDFs by Joe Clark

What else to include with your PDF document

• An online HTML version or summary of the document
• A link to download Adobe Acrobat Reader
• A PDF icon to indicate that it is a PDF document (see an example on the BBC website)

See also

• Microsoft Office and PDF Document Guidelines
• Avoid PDF for on-screen reading (Jakob Nielsen)
• Facts and opinions about PDF accessibility (Joe Clark)

Why "click here" is bad

Why "Click here" is bad linking practice (by Jukka Korpela)

• "Click here" just looks stupid.
• "Click here" looks especially stupid when printed on paper.
• "Click here" is useless in a list of links or when in "links reading" mode, or whenever a link text is considered as isolated from its textual and visual context.
• "Click here" is bad food for search engines. If you say "For information on Unitarianism, click here", search engines won't know that your document contains a link to a document about Unitarianism. Some important search engines use the link text in estimating the relevance of a link. Using descriptive link texts thus helps users in finding documents they're interested in, potentially including your document due to a link text with some key word.
• There's usually a fairly simple way to do things better. Instead of the text "For information on Unitarianism, click here", you could simply type "About Unitarianism".
• "Click here" is device-dependent. There are several ways to follow a link, with or without a mouse. Users probably recognize what you mean, but you are still conveying the message that you think in a device-dependent way.

Describing links correctly

Bad

Good

Click here for information about Unitarianism You can access information on Unitarianism by clicking here More information on Unitarianism is here More information on Unitarianism is available by following this link More information on Unitarianism is available by following this link Follow this link for more information on Unitarianism www.unitarian.org.uk/ To book a place on this course click here

About Unitarianism More information about Unitarianism Find out more about Unitarianism There have been a lot of news items about Unitarianism recently Book a place on this course