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Archive for May, 2009
FullCodePress results
I have just finished testing both the Australian and New Zealand web sites for accessibility. The Australian client is the NSW Disability Discrimination Legal Centre Inc., which assists people with disabilities with their legal rights. The New Zealand client is Rainbow Youth, which assists queer youth and their families in Auckland.
The testing process
Due to the severe time constraints (only two hours to test two sites), I concentrated on finding accessibility errors. I did this using both manual and automated testing, although I only used one automated testing tool: WAVE. I tried some basic user techniques, such as turning style sheets off, turning images off and increasing text size. I also checked ALT attributes (although both sites were quite low on images), heading levels, use of JavaScript, style sheets, text links, field labels and use of PDFs.
NSW Disability Discrimination Act (Australian team)
The biggest problem with the site is that increasing the text size kills the navigation. As the text size increases, the Search box begins to overlap the right hand side of the horizontal navigation. With images turned off, the Search disappears entirely.
There is a field label on the Search but it is incorrect, therefore the field label is not associated with the Search field. Field labels were also a problem on the Membership page.
Unfortunately the link text is very small. This problem is compounded by the link hover colour which is a yellow and difficult to read on the white background.
I was pleased to see that the site functioned correctly with style sheets disabled, and that all PDFs had Word equivalents. The site also used skip links on every page. There were also accesskeys, which are a bit of a no-no nowadays due to conflicts with screen readers, however I didn’t take off points for that. Headings were used appropriately but navigation sometimes wasn’t consistent.
Rainbow Youth (New Zealand team)
The biggest problem with the site is that both the navigation and the footer disappears when images are turned off.
Small text was used in the navigation, and some links were not unique (“Read more”). The links to Flickr, Twitter and Facebook on the homepage use JavaScript to open in a new window. There is no warning that the links will open in a new window, however they do work properly with JavaScript disabled.
As with the Australian example, the site functioned correctly with style sheets disabled. All fields had appropriate field labels. This site also used skip links on every page. Headings were used appropriately and navigation was consistent.
Conclusion
Both teams lost many points for their navigation issues, however in total, the New Zealand site fared better in accessibility stakes. This tallied with the final decision as the Code Blacks (the New Zealand team) won!
Victoria Online seminar
On Friday I ran a seminar on “Accessibility and new technologies” for Victoria Online. Around 120 Victorian Government web staff attended. It was also the launch of the Office for Disability Factsheets, which I have spent several months writing. There are eight accessibility factsheets:
- PDFs
- Video
- Flash
- JavaScript
- Web 2.0 technologies
- What about WCAG2?
- Web Manager’s checklist
- Web Developer’s checklist
The presentation is available in PowerPoint and in HTML. There are also a list of example links used in the presentation
Full Code Press
I am very pleased to report that I am the accessibility judge for the Full Code Press competition.
I was lucky enough to be a judge in the previous competition and some of you may remember me as the haiku twitterer. I’m not sure if I’ll be doing that again this year – sounds like I might be locked out for the night. FCP is at CeBIT this year and the conference locks down at night, so I’ll be locked in or locked out. My choice.
I’m not sure if I can stand being up for fifty hours straight (when the contestants are sleeping I have to be awake for the judging, and I’m guessing people would appreciate me being awake for that!)
