Stop using anchors as buttons!

Posted by Ancestry Team on September 2, 2014 in Accessibility, CSS/HTML/JavaScript, UX, Web

Semantic buttons and links are important for usability as well as accessibility. Hyperlinks indicate a URL change, whereas buttons are used to perform an action. I thought this post up in response to a question asked on Stack Overflow over 5 years ago. Which one should you use? <a href=”#” onclick=”doSomething()”>Do Something</a> <a href=”javascript:void(0);” onclick=”doSomething()”>Do Read More

Core Web Accessibility Guidelines

Posted by Ancestry Team on August 13, 2014 in Accessibility, CSS/HTML/JavaScript

How do you ensure accessibility on a website that is worked on by several hundred web developers? That is the question we are continually asking ourselves and have made great steps towards answering. The approach we took was to document our core guidelines and deliver presentations and trainings to all involved. This included our small Read More

Creating a Completely Accessible Navigation Bar in HTML, CSS, and JS

Posted by Ancestry Team on January 27, 2014 in Accessibility, CSS/HTML/JavaScript, UX, Web

Recently, I volunteered to prototype a new global navigation bar for the core Ancestry.com website. This was a huge opportunity for some drastically needed improvements, not only for the code behind the header, but more importantly, the accessibility of the navigational items. Even though we’re early on in this process of creating an accessible navigation Read More