Accessibility Evaluation of http://data.ole.net/ada/

As noted in earlier email, I wasn't online when replying before.
Here's my thoughts on the web page at http://data.ole.net/ada/,
which seems to belong to I-Can Online.

Generally, graphical designs of this type have problems with
accessibility by people with visual disabilities and others who
must view a site in linear format.

Viewing the site in Lynx, these problems are evident -- the "lead
is buried" to use journalistic terms; in plain English, the
meat of the page is far down within the page itself, and is not
easy to find.  This is common when trying to view sites with
navigation bars in a linear web browser; it can be found on
www.hwg.org and www.idyllmtn.com -- two sites I've designed.

The banner ads are not designed to be accessible to non-visual
users, and use quickly rotating animations, which may cause some
problems for people with cognitive limitations.  Of course, many
people feel that missing out on animated banners is not such a
bad thing!

The page's structure is not easily discernable either in Lynx
or when read out loud; this makes it hard to navigate if you are
one of the aforementioned non-graphical, linear users of the
page.

The imagemap is confusing because it doesn't seem to follow any
sort of order between the cities.

On the plus side, this page seems to have been constructed with
more thought to accessibility than most pages, and has the
advantage of scaling decently well when you crank up the font
size in your browser.  Although some of the colors are weak in
contrast with each other.

Overall, I would say this is a "decently accessible" page that
could stand a few tweaks, but is far from being a "worst
offender" candidate.  I honestly think that there is little
that can be done to improve on the accessibility of this site
without either a radical redesign, or use of server-based site
morphing technology, such as that developed by Edapta.

I give it a "C".  ("C" is a passing grade, on the F - D - C -
B - A scale used by many American schools.)

--Kynn
-- 
--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Tuesday, 18 July 2000 18:55:14 UTC