Sarah Horton

Designing beneath the surface of the web

At its most basic, the web allows for two modes of access: visual and non-visual. For the most part, our design attention is focused on making decisions that affect the visual, or surface, layer --- colors and type, screen dimensions, fixed or flexible layouts. However, much of the power of the technology lies beneath the surface, in the underlying code of the page. There, in the unseen depths of the page code, we make decisions that influence how well, or poorly, our pages are read and interpreted by software. In this paper, we shift our attention beneath the surface of the web and focus on design decisions that affect nonvisual access to web pages.