A QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.

QR Codes storing addresses and URLs may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about any object that users might need information about. Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL.

You can use your phone to read QR codes by installing Kaywa Reader.

And make your own QR code like we have below on the same kaywa site.

QR code containing website link for callendercreates.com

An introduction to barcode scanning on youtube

• We’ve been accepted into The Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS) for our clean and well structured code. We have done this from the start of our business, so it’s nice to get recognition for this.
• We have becomeBusiness link accredited suppliers. Where we are listed in the online directory which allows Local and National companies to contact us as a trusted and reliable company in Web Design and Development.
• This website has been listed in no less than 10 CSS galleries for our recent web site relaunch and rebrand. We are proud to be sharing space on these sites with some other fantastic examples of web design and branding.
• Finally, our company has been nominated by a long-term client for a Small Business Award for Sussex Business Awards. Watch this space!

Since then we have been getting great feedback from the charity based in Portslade.

Programme Manager, Fiona Taylor says:

The number of bookings has far exceeded out targets for this year, and it’s all thanks to the site review Callender Creates carried out, they executed the findings in the design and structure of the new site. Very Exciting.. We are just watching the traffic grow each month!

Site redesigns that are done well, are often regarded as switching a switch and letting all the visitors who could not understand the way to navigate around a site, and get the information they require.

In this instance, this has led to:

• Increase in number of bookings
• Increase in seo and accessibility
• With database work planned soon, to make searching and booking even easier online

We have used Google analytics and Crazy Egg to demonstrate to the client the actions and visitor journey on the site. We have explained also the way the pages are written can determine which pages the visitor clicks onto.

Check out the site at www.concordia-iye.org.uk

Akamai and JupiterResearch have conducted a study among 1,000 online shoppers and have found, among other results, that one third of respondents have, at one point, left a shopping website because of the overall ‘poor experience.’ 75% of them do not intend ever to come back to this website again.

Online shopper loyalty also increases as loading time of webpages decreases. Will this study finally show developers of shopping websites the importance of the performance of their websites?”

Read the comments on the original article at Slashdot

Indeed, Microsoft itself admitted that certain sites that worked well in IE6 would fall apart in IE7. However, no one seemed to know exactly how many sites would be affected by the launch of the new browser. Etre.com decided to fire up a couple of machines and compare the homepages of a hundred different corporate websites in both IE6 and IE7.

The results are available here:
http://www.etre.com/blog/2006/10/ie7_were_they_ready/?nl=1311

“Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) covers a wide range of issues and recommendations for making Web content more accessible. This document contains principles, guidelines, and success criteria that define and explain the requirements for making Web-based information and applications accessible. “Accessible” means usable to a wide range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning difficulties, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech difficulties, photosensitivity and combinations of these.â€?

Whether this new set of guidelines is the new forward-looking, non-technology-dependant vision of accessibility it claims to be or whether it is just another document here to slow down corporate to small web agencies. Perhaps at some point these discussions will include real people with real disabilities who, for some reason, have very little to do with this, but currently that doesn’t seem to be the case.

However, the new guidelines are, in fact, a work in progress and not formally approved yet. It’s not the easiest read at the moment, in fact if you find yourself reading all of it in one sitting you have very good patience.

There’s always something to be said for open discussion like mailing lists and actual accomplishment via showcase web sites. So perhaps groups like the WCAG Samurai (www.wcagsamurai.org) wouldn’t have to exist if the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) committee didn’t tend to move and operate like a sumo wrestler itself.

Remember WCAG 2.0, like WCAG 1.0 before it, is a set of guidelines.

So what shall we do whilst we wait for the guidelines? Well, those of us that actually make websites and care about making them useful and accessible to real people are just going to have to go on doing the best we can on our own, like we’ve pretty much been doing. We will continue to use our experience to think about what we’re doing and how we can make it as useful as possible to all users. That’s what we’ve been doing and what we should continue achieving. We’re hopefully already showing the big company sites how easy it is to do, Roger Johansson’s article on “Google, meet web standards� shows how easy it is to creates accessible standards based sites with just a little bit of thought and forward thinking.

For more information on this subject, heres a good WCAG 2.0 link from this years @media 2006 where the accessibility gurus of Bruce Lawson, Patrick Lauke and Gez Lemon try to explain the finer points to the audience, with not the clearest of explanations, but good for the broad understanding of the subject.

Thus, when advertising a product, one might use a definition list:

Lower cost

The new version of this product costs significantly less than the previous one!

Easier to use

We’ve changed the product so that it’s much easier to use!

Safe for kids

You can leave your kids alone in a room with this product and they won’t get hurt (not a guarantee).

Lists may also be nested and different list types may be used together, as in the following example, which is a definition list that contains an unordered list (the ingredients) and an ordered list (the procedure):

The ingredients:

• 100 g. flour
• 10 g. sugar
• 1 cup water
• 2 eggs
• salt, pepper

The procedure:

1. Mix dry ingredients thoroughly.
2. Pour in wet ingredients.
3. Mix for 10 minutes.
4. Bake for one hour at 300 degrees.

Notes:

The recipe may be improved by adding raisins.

The exact presentation of the three list types depends on the user agent. Try not to use lists purely as a means of indenting text.

This is a stylistic issue and is properly handled by style sheets. Using padding, margin, or text-indent.

There are many organizations and online resources that offer Website owners and authors guidance on how to make websites and pages more accessible for the blind and visually impaired. The W3C publishes numerous guidelines including Web Content Access Guidelines that are helpful for Website owners and authors. Broad adherence to these guidelines is one way of ensuring that sites are universally accessible.

Enter Google labs Accessible Search

http://labs.google.com/accessible/

Called the Google Accessible Search, the search adds a small twist to the familiar Google search and finds the most relevant results as measured by Google’s search algorithms, but also sorts results based on the simplicity of their page layouts. So when users search from the site, they’ll receive results that are prioritized based on their usability.

In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully – pages with few visual distractions and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op’s technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests.

We look forward to this developing and making the web more accessible. And the Co-op developing into making algorithms more favourable toward accessible web sites, like the ones we make at Callender Creates.

It offers guidance on how to develop a website which is user-friendly for disabled people.

“The ‘PAS 78: A guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites’ (published March 2006) is for those responsible for commissioning or maintaining public-facing websites and web-based services. It was developed by the British Standards Institution (BSI) and sponsored by the DRC.”

These guidelines will not tell you how to make an accessible web site, however PAS 78 covers areas such as:

• How disabled people use websites
• Defining the accessibility policy for the website
• Web technologies
• Accessibility testing and maintenance
• Contracting web design and accessibility auditing services.

It gives recommendations for:

• The management of the process of, and guidance on, upholding existing W3C guidelines and specifications
  
• Involving disabled people in the development process and using the current software-based compliance testing tools that can assist with this.

It is applicable to all public and private organizations that wish to observe good practice under the existing voluntary guidelines and the relevant legislation on this subject and is intended for use by those responsible for commissioning public-facing websites and web-based services.

For more reading on PAS 78 and WCAG2.0 check out the @media2006 Notes: The New Accessibility Guidelines: WCAG 2.0 over at Muffin Research