The content of the website needs to be well structured with logical and meaningful titles (h1, h2, h3...). Meaningful words which are important for the understanding of the text, need to be placed at the beginning of the title, as web users mainly only perceive the first few words of a title. Titles should be no longer than 60 characters.
Titles can also have a positive impact on search machine rankings.
Source and further information:
"Prioritizing Web Usability" by Jakob Nielsen/Hoa Loranger.
The tested website does not comply with this requirement.
Pop-ups tend to annoy web users, as they appear suddenly and cannot be controlled. In addition, many users associate pop-ups with untrustworthy gambling and porn sites. User-friendly websites should therefore not include pop-ups, with the following exception: a print-preview of a page displayed as a pop-up.
Source:
"Prioritizing Web Usability" by Jakob Nielsen/Hoa Loranger
Further information:
http://www.usability.ch/Alt_nav/Alertbox/NJ_20041206.htm
The tested website is coded to display pop-ups.
Marking previously visited hyperlinks helps users to identify which pages of the website have previously been read. In other words, according to Nielsen the navigation interface should answer three essential questions: "Where am I?", "Where have I been?" and "Where can I go?"
Source and further information:
"Prioritizing Web Usability" by Jakob Nielsen/Hoa Loranger and "Designing Web Usability" by Jakob Nielsen
The tested website does not support fully this type of marking.
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A potential warning has been identified.
Not all visually impaired people make use of technical support to navigate on the internet. The feature to increase fonts is an important element to ensure that all information of the website can be read by all users. Even people who are not visually impaired need to increase the font sometimes. At the same time, an increasing number of older people surf the web; they too need a feature to increase the font. To this purpose, it is important to define the font size not in pixel, but in percentage or "em".
Source and further information:
"Prioritizing Web Usability" by Jakob Nielsen/Hoa Loranger
The font on the tested website cannot be increased and defined with the automated browser feature "Text Size".
Separating design and structure of the website carries great advantages. The sharper the distinction, the more independent the two areas are. A lack of such a distinction is also called a "spaghetti mark-up" or a "tag-soup" (from the term "HTML tag").
Nowadays it is easy to save colours, type fonts, design images and to a large extent even the layout of the website in CSS files (CSS = Cascading Style Sheet).
Further information:
http://www.style-sheets.de/guide/grundlagen/warum_css
http://www.vorsprungdurchwebstandards.de/theory/retro-coding/
Hint for IT technicians: "Code" does not refer to javascript, but to HTML source.
The tested website contains spaghetti mark-up; morevover, it is not or not fully defined in CSS Format.
HTML is only one of a series of markup languages, though it is the best known one. HTML is relatively old and has seen various, rather different variations. The Document Type Declaration indicates which markup language and which version of it has been used. A sorting software, e.g. a web browser, can understand this indication.
Source and further information: http://de.selfhtml.org/html/allgemein/grundgeruest.htm.
The tested website does not contain any Document Type Declaration. New websites should not be built that way. Older websites should not be updated without a significant upgrade, as most browsers would render the website differently if the HTML source code is invalid. This aspect should be considered for any upgrade.
The logical connection between definition and form field is missing if the form fields lack an explicit title.
This means that in the instance of a linear form, it is not apparent which definition belongs to which fiels. This is why the element LABEL was introduced with the attribute for, allowing the explicit definition for form fields.
Using the element LABEL allows Screen-Readerusers in particular to view the definition of the form field directly in the form field itself.
Source:
http://www.barrierefreies-webdesign.de/knowhow/formulare/label.html. Further information can be found in the W3C accessibility guidelines (12.4 Associate labels explicitly with their controls, Guideline 12, Accessibility Guidelines for Web Content 1.0, W3C recommendations 5th May 1999http://www.w3c.de/Trans/WAI/webinhalt.html) und http://de.selfhtml.org/html/formulare/strukturieren.htm.
Form fields on the tested website do not contain correct labels.
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A potential warning has been identified.
Alternative text is displayed if an image cannot be downloaded or if the mouse pointer is moved over the image*. The alternative text is on one hand important for visually impaired visitors, using an audio tool to read the content of the website and the alternative text of images.
On the other hand, alternative text can also be recognised by search engines. Alternative text needs to be phrased in a meaningful manner, though it should not be a detailed description of the image.
Further information:
http://www.bjoernsworld.de/html/alt-text.html
http://webdesign.crissov.de/alt-Text#Start
* Internet Explorer shows alternative text as a tooltip if the mouse pointer is rested on the image. This is not prohibited but it can annoy page authors. It does also indicate that the alt-attribute refers to this tooltip, which is wrong. Should you want to add a descriptive tooltip to your images, make use of the attribute "title".
Quelle: http://de.selfhtml.org/html/grafiken/einbinden.htm#referenz
The tested website contains undefined alternative text. This needs to be specified as "empty", especially for images which are not part of the visible content.
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A potential warning has been identified.
Older web projects were often designed with so-called "empty images" (i.e. images without content, used as placeholder). This technique is now outdated and should be replaced with CSS features such as "Padding" and "Margin". This allows an increased performance of the website, as well as a strict separation between design and content, and an abstraction of the design from the structure.
Further information:
http://seybold.jan-andresen.de/05killer.php
The tested website contains blank images.