Re: FW: Accessibility evaluation for "after" template page

Before I begin -- Firefox is not doing placing background images for the 
news item more links. Am leaving this as a raised issue for now as must 
go do some paying work ;-)

Shadi Abou-Zahra wrote:
> Looks good on Netscape 7.1. On Opera 8.51 the links in the main content 
> area (center) do not have underlines. I'm sure Pasquale will be happy to 
> test on Mac if he has time.

Thanks. Opera fixed.

> CSS looks better now on the validator, I'll also ask my colleague Bert 
> Bos (Mr CSS) to have a look at it.

Great. Any ideas about resolving IE float issues without recourse to 
display: inline-block greatly appreciated.

>> Abbreviations. I actually find expanding abbreviations aesthetically 
>> annoying when using a screenreader, in cases where the abbreviations 
>> are more often used when speaking than their expanded equivalents, and 
>> therefore omitted on Mb, PDF etc. (though I usually browse with titles 
>> off in JAWS as that is what I find most users doing), but I agree that 
>> this does not follow the letter of the guidelines. But as we are doing 
>> that, do we need to expand PDF too? I'd argue not, but am happy to be 
>> shouted down :)
> 
> Actually, I vote for removing this whole link for several reasons. 
> Mainly because the download "simulation" on the before pages didn't same 
> to work too well, and we also don't want to turn this into a PDF 
> accessibility exercise. This will also take care of the MB/PDF issues 
> which I think are already addressed on the tables page. Do others agree?

I think that the concept of demonstrating that you should make users 
aware of download size is a good one, which was the learning point 
there, but this is not a WCAG recommendation AFAIK, just good practice. 
Have left it for now and await this week's discussion.

>> Headers, had tried for some sort of aesthetic equivalence of 
>> experience (screen reader vs visual) when considering header 
>> structure, hence the v0.3 structure, but as many users just read 
>> through all headers rather than by header number (unless you're using 
>> Window-eyes, I guess), I am ambivalent about how best to do it. 
>> Shifting the position in the code -- too many crossbrowser headaches 
>> with absolute positioning, I think. We'd be back to empty placeholder 
>> divs before we knew it. I am not keen on putting images as H1 -- seems 
>> to me that a site logo is not a page heading, any more than a masthead 
>> is a newspaper's main headline. So have gone for <strong> as the best 
>> option for the Traffic and Today sections, with H1 kept for the main 
>> content headline.
> 
> I agree about not going down the road of trying to flip the header order 
> to make the "Welcome to Citylights" the first <h1>. It seems like a 
> headache and not really a common practice.
> I also like the idea of having the top banner as an <h1> that would read 
> "Citylights, your access to the city". It could be invisible or simply 
> using the ALT of the <img> as Steve suggests. I think it matches the 
> visual experience more closely. However, I also see the counter argument 
> and am open for discussion.

I stand my my the-branding-is-not-the-heading position, but am happy to 
go with the majority.

>> Quick menu and left hand menu redundancy. I don't think we can merge 
>> them without confusing our message of leaving a site looking the same 
>> after applying the accessibility improvements. I haven't' changed 
>> this... one for discussion?
> 
> This issue is probably a result of having such a small site without 
> sub-menu items. However, a quick menu is a common problem on many Web 
> sites and we do want to demonstrate it. Maybe this is an argument for a 
> (invisible?) label that includes some description of the quick menu.

Still doesn't deal with the issue that they are highly redundant. Maybe 
we could change it to a 'topics menu' -- concerts (data.html), crime 
(news.html), animals (news.html), traffic (form.html)

Oh. One more thing. Facts = concert tickets? Shurely not.

>> Link text, quite right, but again we need to discuss the 'leave it 
>> looking as you found it' issue. I have changed the 'read more' ones 
>> for now as I hated them anyway :-)
> 
> You've changed the "full story" ones too. I like it now much more now. 
> As to the "Killer Bees" and "Onions", it is clearer now that these are 
> external links.

Have not actually made any change to the Killer Bees and Onions links, 
but would argue that labelling external links as such is not a strictly 
a WCAG issue.

>> Other questions: how do we feel about (redundant) links from headings 
>> not being underlined or coloured? Contrast right hand side headings 
>> with  main content news story headings.
> 
> I think the headings of the top stories section should not be underlined 
> and should also have a different color (maybe even text size/font 
> (asking designer)). They are primarily headers and the (redundant) 
> linking in the header is just to promote usability of the page.

Changed.

-- 
Liam McGee, Managing Director, Communis Ltd
www.communis.co.uk      +44 (0)1373 836 476