Re: CSS-P Site Built For Accessibility

5 minute review impressions...

It is unclear to me why javascript is necesary - I used a text and a graphic
browser to check it out without a lot of problem except where the links were 
javascript references for a new window. This is not helpful for accessiblity
in general, and doing it through Javascript is a bad idea in particular.

Where there are audio/video versions of information it would be helpful to
provide more details about what they are - for example instead of the current
code something like

<p><a href="videofile"><img src="realvideo_icon" alt="welcome message
(video)"></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<A href="videofile">Welcome message (video)</a></p>

something like

<p><a href="videofile" title="Welcome message, real Video version"><img
src="realvideo_icon" alt="Real Video" title="Real Video Icon"><span
class="nounderline">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span>Welcome message (video)</a></p>

would be nice - provides the fact that it is realvideo (you should also use a
type attribute in the a element to do this in a machine-readable way) to the
user, and means tere is one link not two - having to skip through multiple
redundant links is something worth avoiding if possible - especially with a
head-switch or similarly slow input system.

Requiring a fixed screen size is not very helpful and should be avoided -
people who are using magnified screens (or even just getting the crucial bits
by using a 30 or 40 pt font) are then unable to avoid having the problem of
scrolling horizontally as well as verticaly, which is a serious hassle.

For the rollover functions it would be nice to make them work for non-mouse
users - add an onFocus/onBlur set of triggers.

In general the text alternatives seem to be done intelligently. It would
probably have made more sense to use a single external stylesheet. And given
a regular image-naming schema you could write a short function to find the
names, and reduce the size of the page source by a substantial amount.

Cheers,

Charles McCN

--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                    http://www.w3.org/WAI
21 Mitchell Street, Footscray, VIC 3011,  Australia 

On Thu, 6 Jan 2000, Joel Sanda wrote:

  Hi;
  
  I'm a webmaster for eCollege.com - a company that puts schools on the
  Internet with a variety of solutions for online and distance education. We
  have been researching and implementing W3C WAI standards, and have a site we
  would like some feedback on. Our most recent attempt employs CSS Positioning
  for nearly all layout. There are minor exceptions where we had to insert
  simple (no embedded) tables to ensure consistent formatting for both
  Netscape and Microsoft browsers.
  
  The site is at http://online.luc.edu/, and should comply with all WAI
  Priority 1 Recommendations, with a few minor exceptions. Some of the content
  areas do not yet have text-based versions available, although we do have a
  video and audio version.
  
  I have used JAWS 3.31 on the site, and it seems to do fairly well with site
  navigation and content. The site also passed Bobby and the W3C's CSS
  Validator.
  
  Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
  
  Joel Sanda
  Webmaster
  
  eCollege.com
  10200 A East Girard Avenue
  Denver, CO 80231
  
  phone	303.873.7400  ext.3021
  fax    	303.873.7449
  
  "Educators Working for Educators"
  www.eCollege.com
  

--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                    http://www.w3.org/WAI
21 Mitchell Street, Footscray, VIC 3011,  Australia (I've moved!)

Received on Saturday, 8 January 2000 00:15:38 UTC