[Original article by Jason Corns is a freelance web developer and full-time GUI developer for Systems Alliance, Inc., specializing in usability for all audiences.]
hough the methods used to gather website traffic statistics call into question the validity of the stats themselves, the fact is that some of your website’s visitors will have JavaScript disabled.
You could divide your traffic sources into four broad categories: search engines, mobile visitors, visitors using screen readersand visitors who have JavaScript turned off.
When planning your information architecture and design, you must figure out how to deal with these special groups.
I have assembled a few recent real-world scenarios to find clarity on the issue.
When you want to hide lengthy content behind an animated scroller, or rotate through products or testimonials in sequence, or present categorized page-level content cleanly, you could use accordions, carousels or any other imaginative solution.
If you keep up with JavaScript best practices or use any of the myriad of JavaScript libraries, you are probably already familiar with unobtrusive JavaScript, which is the technique of presenting JavaScript interactivity only when JavaScript is enabled.
This principle should be extended to presentation as well: build your dynamic feature(s) and set your display and visibility values only after the document is ready and only if the visitor has JavaScript enabled, rather than set the properties in your HTML code or define them server-side.
As a major (ab)user of jQuery use, and despite years of UX/UI design, I admit that I rarely think about this possibility – I think we all pretty much assume Javascript is available. And as we move onto mobile platforms, the disparity of choice and engines is higher and higher. In any case, if you’ve ever found yourself in this boat, read this article (in its entirety) here for some great solutions to common problems…