Re: Accessibility tests of Australian University homepages

The distracting animation is from the stylesheets and is not content,  
but formatting!
Strong is overused perhaps but in the print style it hi-lights all the  
keywords.

Is  Lynx at all like JAWS, is it like a graphical browser?
The <hr> is in a div so that Microsoft with display the hr as Explorer  
will not display background images in <hr>
Javascript preload images, there is a noscript warning and Javascript  
allows changing stylesheets.

I dispute your comment about no schema at all
There is a character set defined. iso

Some fair comments and then you are all over the place on one browser
You are trying to print a black page and comment to me about color  
contrast, really.

Tim

On 09/05/2007, at 8:53 PM, David Woolley wrote:

>
> Tim wrote:
>> Did you pick a colour blindnes stylesheet or check the accessibility  
>> statement?
>
> The standard style sheet results in something very difficult to read  
> for someone with normal colour vision!
>
> There is gratuitous use of strong.
>
> There is distracting animation - this surely has to disqualify it from  
> AAA status.
>
> class is abused as a style sheet macro, rather than for semantic  
> sub-classing, although the result isn't the actual green implied by  
> the class name.
>
> No style is better, but there is a weird line (which don't appear in  
> the default styling, or at least I can't find them) which is  
> completely cryptic. (Using the Publishing index page, from now on.)   
> This is what it looks like in Lynx:
>
>   :   :  > :   :   :   :   :
>
> Lynx also shows the first page almost completely blank except for:
>
>    #Second  level  index  on  Hereticpress.com
>
> (which is the result of link elements) on the top line, and
>
>    Skip Nav
>
> on the bottom line.
>
> The first half on the second page on Lynx is a "please upgrade"  
> paragraph:
>
>    Some  cascading  stylesheet  layout  features  on this page requires
>    a browser  that  supports  JavaScript(TM).  Your browser either does
>
> The centre justification results in some really big gaps in the Lynx
> rendering of:
>
>    * University    600    Kb : Web    survey    Australian   university
>      sites : Updated 7th May 2007
>
> There is an empty division, which looks like it is really an <hr>:
>
>   <div class="HR"></div>
>
> There is no H1 and H2 and H3 are used for what seems to be the same  
> actual heading level.
>
> It was written by someone who doesn't understand the HTML script  
> interface:
>
>    onclick="JavaScript:window.location='.....
>
> (Javascript: schemes are proprietary bad practice, but this is  
> actually an unreferenced label in an anonymous function, not a scheme  
> at all!)
>
> XHTML is used, but it is served as text/html.  No foreign namespaces  
> are used.  On the home page, table is used without tbody; this is an  
> appendix C violation, because it results in a text/html parser getting  
> a different DOM from a true XHTML parser.
>
> The XHTML does not use UTF (overridden by the HTTP Content-Type, but  
> the  true character set is not specified in the XML directive - there  
> isn't one.  I might be wrong about that being mandatory, but it is  
> certainly good practice.
>
> Even with the print stylesheet, the navigation bar is printed.
>
> Printing (print preview) from the black and gold sheet results in some  
> very poor colour contrasts, e.g. bright green on white.
>
> Incidentally, the best reference I've seen on colour blindness  
> (although I think the case here was cognitive disabilities, for which  
> gratuitous styling and animation is an issue, particularly the use of  
> non-standard link colours, although, at least, you retained the  
> underline) is the BT Research one.  Although I can no longer find the  
> original paper, this web site seems to have the same content:
>
> <http://www.btplc.com/age_disability/technology/RandD/colours/ 
> index.htm>
>
> (Note.  People with cognitive disabilities are even less likely than  
> most to find the alternative styles menu.)
>
>
The Editor
Heretic Press
http://www.hereticpress.com
Email dogstar27@optushome.com

Received on Wednesday, 9 May 2007 11:14:34 UTC