And while we're on it, make sure websites are operable by keyboard too (tab and enter, mostly). What for? Visually impaired people.
I know someone who is totally blind, has worked with MS-DOS while he could see, but got blind before Windows 3.1 even came out. Yet he works with and version of Windows, sends and reads email, searches videos on Youtube, and browses the web. That last one is becoming more and more tricky with div-onclick="location=somewhere;" (instead of a-href) and other Javascript all over the place.
Screen readers are made to read text. Flash is hard but sometimes possible, Javascript is becoming a good competitor to Flash in the sense of that it's rendering the web almost as inaccessible.
Images too are a problem of course, without alt attribute they are totally worthless to blind people.
So if you want to present something to the entire market, be sure to have either an accessible website or a mobile version, both preferably in the local language (you should hear how Dutch text to speech software reads English, sounds more like Chinese--literally). And there are about 160 million people blind around the world, even if only a tenth of that speaks English and has internet access, that are 16 million people. Nearly as much as the entire population of the Netherlands.
Very true, I would also prefer something that works even in a text based browser. I've never really 100% fit in with the user standard, being one of the first to browse the web from my mobile phone (Nokia 6230i back then) or using alternative browsers when MSIE's market share was still >90%. I've had more than enough compatibility trouble to go along with something working on only some systems.
(For example I'm currently building a website which will also support everything from high-end desktops to text-based terminals. Only disqus comments are a pain, making the page size go from 23KB to over 500KB and requiring Javascript, but the tradeoff seems worth it--trust me, I thought it trough over and over and over lol.)
I know someone who is totally blind, has worked with MS-DOS while he could see, but got blind before Windows 3.1 even came out. Yet he works with and version of Windows, sends and reads email, searches videos on Youtube, and browses the web. That last one is becoming more and more tricky with div-onclick="location=somewhere;" (instead of a-href) and other Javascript all over the place.
Screen readers are made to read text. Flash is hard but sometimes possible, Javascript is becoming a good competitor to Flash in the sense of that it's rendering the web almost as inaccessible.
Images too are a problem of course, without alt attribute they are totally worthless to blind people.
So if you want to present something to the entire market, be sure to have either an accessible website or a mobile version, both preferably in the local language (you should hear how Dutch text to speech software reads English, sounds more like Chinese--literally). And there are about 160 million people blind around the world, even if only a tenth of that speaks English and has internet access, that are 16 million people. Nearly as much as the entire population of the Netherlands.