Thank you Geoffrey Re: Mainz Web Content Publisher

Thanks for pointing out this site. It does a bunch of interesting 
things, and it took me a good half hour to work out how it worked. 
Except for the front page which relies on styles to be reasonably 
presentable, and provides a null alt text for a crucial image link "the 
button" that people couldn't find because lynx skips an apparetly 
functionless image unless you turn on verbose image handling (asterisk 
key, for the curious). Interestingly it works as designed in Amaya, 
since that is a primarily graphic browser and the problem is one that 
occurs for non-graphic rendering. Even then in the alternate (text only) 
view you can activate the link, although you don't know it is there 
unless you check the list of links.

The keyboard control is partially a reflection of its design for 
explorer and partially a reflection of things that IE developers have 
done to try and make keyboard control work even on badly coded sites 
(although this has potential implications for well-coded sites - life is 
about compromise and once again the Web is being compromised :).

Once you get into the site it is pretty standard stuff, reasonably 
functional even in lynx.

It seems to me a courageous decision on the part of lynx to skip a 
linked image in navigation - sensible in a standard-respecting world but 
not an obvious choice for default 'advanced user' mode.

One alt text wrong and the whole site goes from being pretty good for 
accessibility (a few minor errors but the site can be used OK I think) 
to being completely unusable. I don't know what the interaction of 
styles and javascript does to screen readers - without checking a quick 
ponder suggests it "should work OK..." - it does resize pretty well 
(images excepted - no SVG here yet), and most functions seems to use 
standard methods. It isn't perfect - as others have noted can't be 
validated, there are places where things could be improved, but aside 
from the one enormous failure it's not too bad, and should be able to 
get to perhaps double-A without a massive redesign.

Cheers

Chaals

Hoffman, Geoffrey wrote:

>I was doing some research for an anniversary trip when I stumbled upon this
>site and thought I'd share it with the group.
>
>http://www.grandcanyonlodges.com/
>
>>From what I can tell, it's built primarily for Internet Explorer. If you use
>IE, Check out the keyboard controls - it seems pretty well done, but I
>didn't spend a ton of time with it. I checked it with NS7 and it gets a
>completely different treatment.
>
>Have you heard of Mainz Web Content Publisher or Alesco Enterprises? 
>
>
>  
>

Received on Tuesday, 6 May 2003 13:02:14 UTC