How do I get my webpage to work for everybody?

December 9, 2005 8:24 AM

How far do I have to go to make my website accessible?

I volunteered to do a website for our church. We are a very small, aging parish with many families that have been around for generations. We are trying to attract new members and retain old ones. The purpose of the site is for advertising our parish as well as providing resoures for current members.
I tried to be very concious of the fact that many of our members are older, have older computers and little computer knowledge etc. I am predominantly self-taught, and used AskMe to find resources that would help me with this. I did as much pure css as possible and tried to avoid flash and dhtml and java. I am slowly but surely validating all the pages. The main page, for sure, is html and css validated.
I have checked the site on as many computers as possible, and it renders 99% perfectly on most of them. (even when there is a slight layout glitch the site is still useable) The problem? Our church secretary, who is also a vestry member, claims that she can neither access it at home or in the church office. She is very put out by this and rebuffs my attempts to troubleshoot the problem. "Oh, it won't work on MY computer. I'm using Netscape and 9.5." (I assume she means Windows 95!) She says she can't pull up the page AT ALL, either at home or in the church office.
Considering that she is the public face of the parish, it'd be nice if she had something positive to say about the website when new people call for information. But on the other hand, how much more can I do to make the site work for people using older technology?

The site is here if any one wants to take a look at it. Like I said, I'm self-taught, so be nice :)

posted by Biblio to computers & internet (30 comments total)

Maybe it's AOL 9.5?
posted by voidcontext at 8:28 AM on December 9, 2005

Maybe it's AOL 9.5?

I hadn't thought of that, but I just went over to AOL and it looks like they're only on version 9.0.
posted by Biblio at 8:35 AM on December 9, 2005

Could it be Mac OS 9.5?
posted by staggernation at 8:40 AM on December 9, 2005

No, it couldn't, because that doesn't exist. Sorry. Ignore me.
posted by staggernation at 8:41 AM on December 9, 2005

She is very put out by this...

Have you considered the possibility that she's distorting the truth somewhat, due to some seemingly unrelated concern?

FWIW: in vaguely similar circumstances I've run in to people who insist that the "new thing" simply will not work for them, when it demonstrably does, in fact, work for them in every respect.

...in my case it turned out to be a weird passive-aggressive thing between the recalcitrant person and a superior of hers (neither myself nor the new technology were involved in the original problem any way; she simply decided to transfer her irritation to me even though I had nothing to do with her or her superior. I think she felt that she should have been the one to bring in the new tech, even though she didn't understand it AT ALL and had zero reason to think the task would have been given to her rather than, say, someone in IS/IT).
posted by aramaic at 8:49 AM on December 9, 2005

Off the top of my head, the only thing that would give ye olde browsers a problem would be the DHTML/CSS rollovers.

You could take them off and ye olde browsers would be fine - but by the sounds of it, the church secretary hasn't actually tried looking at it, doesn't care and is just making up any excuse to imply the problem is with you rather than with her. Otherwise she'd accept your offer to take a look at her PC and see what the problem is.

You can't make everyone look at your web-page, especially people who don't actually care.
posted by badlydubbedboy at 8:51 AM on December 9, 2005

You know, you could always go to her house and check what she's talking about. Little old women are not to be trusted. (Honestly, without seeing the version and type of software she's using on her own, you'll never determine it.)

Then, after seeing for yourself that she's typing the address in backwards or forgetting those pesky consonants, and showing her "the right way," you could use BrowserCam to avoid compatibility problems in the future. But even that doesn't help teach people how to spell, sadly.
posted by disillusioned at 8:55 AM on December 9, 2005

What type of error is she getting on the computer in the church office? It can be really hard to debug a site if you can't see the problem yourself.

seeing as how you are using HTML 4, I would use tables rather than DIVs (I know, I know, not very cool, but if it works...). AFAIK Netscape 4 used a different definition for DIVs (namely ). So this could be an issue.
posted by twistedonion at 8:55 AM on December 9, 2005

I'm pretty sure Netscape 1.0 and Mosaic won't render CSS...

I'm sure she means Win95 and Netscape 4. It was a very common combo for a long time.

Read the access logs of the website - look for the oldest User-Agent - consider what to do about it. (Easy alternate path: ask to see church office computer, see what web browser is installed.) Some paths:

a) get secretary to install Firefox
b) design webpage to render in Mosaic
c) sniff User-Agent, give Netscape 4 users one page, everyone else another

The above notes about it possibly being a PEBKAC problem (problem exists between keyboard and chair) rather than a technical problem might well be correct.
posted by jellicle at 8:59 AM on December 9, 2005

badlydubbedboy - you're probably right. If it were simply the rollovers, then the complaint would be "I can see the site but the menu doesn't work" which was the problem everybody had with my first design, leading me to try to pare down the dhtml.

She has some sort of weird problem with me. Well, with the fact that the rector and other vestry members like and appreciate me and my hightech ideas. She's not getting enough strokes for putting cute clip art in the Sunday bulletin, maybe.
posted by Biblio at 9:04 AM on December 9, 2005

claims that she can neither access it at home or in the church office

You need to determine precisely what this means. To me it doesn't sound like it has anything to do with the actual HTML or CSS used on the site, it sounds like a basic connectivity problem. Or maybe she's typing the URL incorrectly. Or maybe she's typing the URL into yahoo or something. Or maybe she doesn't have the modem connected. The point is that I don't think you really can do a thing about this until you actually watch in person as she tries to access the site.

It could also be that she has some alterior motive to not liking the site as others have already alluded to. So in any case, you need to get to the bottom of what precisely she means. I honestly don't think it's going to matter one lick whether you used TABLE or DIV in this case.
posted by Rhomboid at 9:04 AM on December 9, 2005

s/alterior/ulterior/
posted by Rhomboid at 9:05 AM on December 9, 2005

She refused to stick around after the vestry meeting and show me the issue on the office computer (and of couse I don't have the password). The Rector is going to log me in on Sunday after the service, which will probably give her heart papitations, since I'll be sitting in her chair.

She says the reason it doesn't work in the office is that we're using Juno for access and since it's free, they limit the number of sites we can use. Uh huh.
posted by Biblio at 9:09 AM on December 9, 2005

Can't pull up the page AT ALL? Meaning she gets an error or a blank page? (I ask because everyone seems to be troubleshooting a garbled page, rather than a non-existent page.) There can be DNS issues that cause that to happen, though I'm afraid I'm not solid enough there to explain/help much.
posted by bricoleur at 9:10 AM on December 9, 2005

Do you think she's maybe typing .com instead of .org? Seriously, if the page is not rendering at all...
posted by xammerboy at 9:13 AM on December 9, 2005

There is no point reasoning with people like this. I once had an irate user complain that they didn't get our page when typing in the new URL. Eventually I ascertained that she was typing it into Yahoo. I suggested she type it in the address bar, and she reluctantly accepted this workaround but continued to blame us for its failure to come up when she typed it in the Yahoo window. (The domain was new and hadn't been picked up by the search engines yet.) There are people with absolutely no concept of GIGO who expect the same degree of error-tolerance from their PC that they do from their fellow humans and react to any failure on the PC's part to follow what they consider clear instructions a personal affront.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 9:20 AM on December 9, 2005

I agree, you need to diagnose whether this is a user-error problem. I doubt you've done anything wrong.

Other observations:
1. You can do rollovers in straight CSS, no DHTML.
2. For naive users, it is often recommended that all links be underlined (even though I personally dislike that look).
3. I'd try to make it so that the top navbar doesn't change between pages (except, perhaps, an indicator of "this is the page you are on").
posted by adamrice at 9:51 AM on December 9, 2005

Whilst I agree that this is probably a chair-keyboard interface problem, Dive Into Accessibility by Mark Pilgrim is a great resource for "proper" accessibility problems (i.e for disabled rather than difficult users).

Also, if it turns out to be an actual browser issue, check out Position Is Everything, as they've got a huge collection of bugs and workarounds.

You might find it helpful in the long run to do all presentation via CSS - I noticed a few font tags etc in your HTML. Not strictly necessary for to solve your problem, but best practices and all that. :-)
posted by djgh at 10:22 AM on December 9, 2005

You could e-mail her a link to the website, have her open it while you're on the phone with her, and then watch the access log at the same time. You'll be certain whether she visited or not, no matter what she verbally says.
posted by odinsdream at 10:27 AM on December 9, 2005

Everyone else has addressed the little old lady problem, so I'll give you some tips related to general accessibility.

First, the blue on red is a little hard on the eyes. Second, people not familiar with the internet expect all links to be underlined. If you want to do a hover effect on your links, it's better to start underlined and remove the underline on hover than the other way around.

One thing that I found slightly confusing was that the nav buttons move on each page. For ease of use, it's best to keep them in the same spot on every page.

Last but not least, if you're concerned about how the page looks in older browsers, try hiding the stylesheet from them.
posted by geeky at 11:02 AM on December 9, 2005

I just quickly looked at your site in Netscape 4.79 (Win2K). Netscape has trouble with spaces in filenames so some images don't show up unless I replaced the spaces with %20 (e.g. changed "images/church bw.jpg" to "images/church%20bw.jpg"). Otherwise, everything certainly displays adequately (no rollovers and much of the layout is degraded but gracefully so).

BTW, you can still download 4.7x here.
posted by TimeFactor at 11:06 AM on December 9, 2005

Cool tip geeky.
posted by Mitheral at 11:52 AM on December 9, 2005

adamrice: 2. For naive users, it is often recommended that all links be underlined (even though I personally dislike that look).

This is not only for inexperienced users, but also anyone who might not be able to distinguish a link based on color difference alone (the colorblind, for example). Underlining is the most common and widely accepted method, but it's more important that there be something other than color that distinquishes links, like MeFi's bold text.
posted by camcgee at 11:56 AM on December 9, 2005

Works on Netscape 3.04 on my Windows XP machine, although the images on the discussion site are broken.

Also works just fine on the web brower for blind people that I develop.

(I think it's a good site: it has content of interest, including some good photos. Perhaps some more on your church community - pictures of people looking happy after the service, people singing, some biographies? I'd try to make the formatting more consistent between pages - looks smarter. I second the consistent menu bar: you should have the same items on it in the same order on every page. You might consider a table-based design for layout if you find it easier: so long as you keep it to one layout table with maybe two/three table cells you should be okay. I find it much easier to get things like columns that go all the way down the page working in tables. You'll not win any awards, but the important thing is a nice-looking site for the church, right?)
posted by alasdair at 12:31 PM on December 9, 2005

(Sorry, TimeFilter has explained the problem with the images in Netscape.)
posted by alasdair at 12:32 PM on December 9, 2005

Ditch the bright red background, if you have to incorporate red, use a darker shade that doesn't hurt my eyes. Otherwise, good work. And use tables if you want to be more compatible, but if 99% of your users can use it, I don't think it's a problem with the site but with the little old lady. Good luck being tech support.
posted by lychee at 1:05 PM on December 9, 2005

Hey everyone, thanks for your help. What I love about diving into code is that I learn something every day, and it's nice to get feedback.

I am definitely going to send the whole vestry a link via email and ask them to visit within a certain time frame and report back to me.

As far as my menu bar goes, I think I did something inadvertant to it today because it didn't used to shift like that. If anyone has a pure css roll-over that does what I'm trying to do there, feel free to email it to me.

I am planning on adding some community oriented stuff to the site as we go. This is obviously a work in progress. I installed the message board more to learn how to do it than out of any hope that folks will use it.

Well, this is WAY off the topic now! I think I will just have to accept that this woman (not as little and old as you might think) is a PITA. Thanks again.
posted by Biblio at 2:04 PM on December 9, 2005

Another vote to mute the red. It really tweaked with my eyes and I'm not an "aging parishoner". ;^)

The red cross in the Episcopal Church graphic might be a better match.
posted by deborah at 2:20 PM on December 9, 2005

Can't help you with your old-lady problem, but something I'd recommend?

This image should be split up. The top part should be a JPG and the bottom part should be a GIF, and the middle part should be empty space.

It's 13.5 Kb at the moment, but I just turned it into a 4 Kb JPG and a 2.5 Kb GIF. Plus of course the church logo is never going to be crisp and sharp as a JPG.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 3:23 PM on December 9, 2005

Your site is fine with Win95 and Netscape 4. Your site is perfectly fine in Lynx, for heaven's sake.
posted by Wolfdog at 3:49 PM on December 9, 2005