Re: Request for Review of WAI Site Redesign Prototype

Hi Shawn and others,

At 20:37 2/07/2005, you wrote:
>Dear Christophe,
>
>You may have seen the recent message to the WAI IG list about the WAI Web 
>Site Redesign[1]. We are now asking a few specific people to spend some 
>time with the prototype to see if there are any substantial problems that 
>we might have missed.
>(...)

I've tested the two pages mentioned below in a number of browsers on 
Windows 2000.

General:

The following logos/images are hard or impossible to read when the pages 
are displayed as white on black (e.g. in Opera's user mode: High Contrast 
(W/B)), probably because of the transparency of pixels in the images:
- the image in the Translations link,
- the image in the text resize/color link,
- the skip to content link (the arrow is still somewhat recognisable),
- the magnifying glass in the WAI site search link,
- the captcha image in the highlights on the home page.

I like the image of the bridge; I interpret it as "bridging the digital 
divide" (or at least a specific part of the digital divide).

Zooming with Mozilla 1.7.3 and Opera 7.54 works well. When zooming more 
than 250%, I find I have to disable CSS (in Opera's user mode) because text 
in the navigation bars and side bars starts to overflow the borders of the 
divs. Perhaps a style sheet switcher (see e.g. [1] and [2]) with a zoom 
layout [3] could help. (A zoom layout without columns would solve the problem.)

The link to the W3C home page is duplicated (in <div id="masthead">..., and 
in <div id="nav">(...)<p id="wainav">...). Is this necessary?

The image in the Translations link is very wide and some visitors may 
associate its colour with a visited link (and think there are two links 
close to each other on the same line?).

Some older versions of Mozilla don't display background images inserted with
background: url(...)
if the url is not quoted.



Home page [http://www.w3.org/WAI/ut3/]:

In Mozilla 1.7.3, Tim Berners-Lee's quote (<div class="sidebar">...) 
disappears behind the left-hand navigation, with some letters still visible 
between the two blue blocks. Which part of the quote is still visible 
depends on the size of the browser window.
In Internet Explorer 6, the quote is not visible at all, regardless of the 
window size. When I try "Find" to find part of the quote, the text seems to 
be there, but it is invisible.

I would remove the dashed border of <h2>Highlights</h2>. Maybe this heading 
can be removed and the <h1> changed to
<h1>Web Accessibility Initiative (<acronym>WAI</acronym>): Highlights</h1>?
(The dashed border of <h2>Highlights</h2> is visible behind the <div 
id="announce">, but the dashed border of
<h2><a name="i-what" id="i-what">What is Web Accessibility</a></h2> on the 
contents page is not visible behind the page contents <ul>.
Adding
     background: #fffaf5;
to the style for #announce in wai-main.css solves this.
In Internet Explorer 6, there is a lot of whitespace between <h1> and 
<h2>Highlights</h2>.
I wonder how clear "The Fellowship of the Guidelines" is to non-native 
speakers of English. Those who are familiar with "The Fellowship of the 
Ring" might at first think that "The Fellowship of the Guidelines" refers 
to the people who create and maintain the guidelines.



Content page [http://www.w3.org/WAI/ut3/intro/accessibility.php]:

The line height for <li> elements in the page contents section (<div 
id="contents">) is too small.

The <title> elements on some of the content pages are not consistent and 
sometimes contain errors:
- on http://www.w3.org/WAI/ut3/intro/accessibility.php, I would expect 
"WAI: Introduction to Accessibility" (colon instead of comma), but on many 
other pages (e.g. in the Guidelines & Techniques section), the title does 
not start with "WAI: ",
- http://www.w3.org/WAI/ut3/intro/components.php: <title> says "Untitled 
document"; elsewhere, there are placeholders, so there is no need for me to 
comment on those;
- http://www.w3.org/WAI/ut3/managing.html: <title> says "WAI Resources on 
Managing Accessisbility"; last word should be "Accessibility"



[1] 
http://joeclark.org/access/webaccess/WCAG/f2f/recommendations.html#SWITCHER-EXAMPLES
[2] http://www.alistapart.com/articles/phpswitch/
[3] http://www.alistapart.com/articles/lowvision/


Regards,

Christophe Strobbe



-- 
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Departement of Electrical Engineering - Research Group on 
Document Architectures
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 - 3001 Leuven-Heverlee - BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/

Received on Tuesday, 5 July 2005 03:39:57 UTC