Graceful Degradation
It’s quite often that accessibility and findability actually overlap. Graceful degradation is one such case.
Graceful degradation is when a system can still operate if degraded, albeit at a lesser capacity, but some operational capability is better than none. What this means in relation to web design is that if your progressively enhanced content (which you can learn more about over at Eric Peterson’s blog) is no longer functional for some reason, getting JavaScript or images turned off in the browser settings, then the page is still functional and gets its message across.
Why is this important? Well, if you have a site that’s very image dependent and that’s your only way of getting your message across and someone discovers your site with images turned off, then that user doesn’t get the full experience. This can be detrimental to your site because you’ve just lost one potential visitor because you didn’t structure your content properly and who knows how many other users have experienced the same thing (well, you’d know if you used some form of traffic analysis :P).
This is just one example, but problems like this arise for primarily Flash sites and sites that use a lot of JavaScript, but don’t actually check to see what the page looks like when degraded.
There are many ways to make sure your page gracefully degrades, such as SWFObject for Flash sites, but for the most part, you just have to make sure to check how your site functions with these features turned off/deactivated in the browser.
Tags: Accessibility, Findability
