Weird display problem at the-big-meow.com -- can people help?

[dianeduane]

I had a mail from a nice lady who said she wanted to subscribe to The Big Meow, but was having trouble. I suggested she click on the button at the top of the sidebar, and she wrote back, "What button?"

This is extremely weird, as the button displays perfectly on every browser I've got. Would those of you who have a moment please look at the "Big Meow" website's index page and tell me whether you can see the "Buy Now" button or not? And if you can't see it, please let me know what browser you're using.

Thanks!

(BTW,  for those of you who might be interested -- now that Lulu.com is offering hardcovers [with dustjackets even!], I'm going to do a costing on how much an "upgrade" to hardcover would cost for those who've already subscribed to the paperback. Stay tuned.)

(If you are interested, you might drop the contact email on the TBM page a mail with just the word HARDCOVER in the subject, so I can get a sense of the numbers.)

Comments

[kengr]

I checked the page in Lynx, a text only browser as that is both a "lowest common denominator" and because it's the quickest way to simulate a blind user's screen reader.

And that showed up a problem. You don't have an "alt" tag for the "buy now" image. So all I got was the name of the image file.

Here's the existing code for that "button".

<a target="_blank" href="https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?i=5069&c=single&cl=666"><img src="https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/x-click-butcc.gif" border="0" /></a>

Here's what it *should* be (with the added bit highlighted in red):

<a target="_blank" href="https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?i=5069&c=single&cl=666"><img src="https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/x-click-butcc.gif" border="0" alt="Buy Now" /></a>

Adding that bit will give folks the "Buy Now" text when they mouse over it, and with text only browsers or screen readers they'll get "Buy Now" indicated as a link instead of "x-click-butcc"

Dunno if it'll work, but here's the edited version to test.

[kengr]

Oh, almost forgot. Two tools that are invalubale for catching that sort of "oops".

The W3C Markup Validation Service
http://validator.w3.org/

since these are the folks who *define* HTML, anything that this tool objects to really *does* need to be fixed.

It's also nice in that you can upload the page from your system so you can check it before it goes online.


"WebXACT is a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues."
http://webxact.watchfire.com/

A lot of what this checks is overkill for most of use. But it does catch things like broken links and some other issues that are worth pursuing.