example of AA websites
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Do you have some websites that could represent a good AA website ? Just to help me having an outlook of it:)
Thank you
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go on then... who's confident enough that their site DEFINITELY achieves AA?
Be prepared to be shot down
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Single-A probably but I have never done any full Double-A sites. Although I know some certain organisations who I won't mention would have passed me off as Double-A. For Double-A the whole site MUST pass not just a few pages.
The Guild of Accessible Web Designers is supposed to have a minimum of Double-A to enter.
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WVYFC chose the Yorkshire Air Ambulance as the main charity to fund raise for in 2006
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wow so actually those guidelines explain the perfect accessibility but we doesnt have the tool yet to do it right ? hummmm...... what about the single A sites ? Its not that hard to do it no? huh_________________
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Smaller sites are easier and hope this achieves it: www.changeinmind.com . Larger/proper website I work on for my main job have aimed for Double A www.eteach.com (still a work in progress but I would say 95% complete with the odd .NET2 adding its own code becomes a pain)... Eteach don’t as yet claim Double A in any accessibility statement.. Yet._________________
Johan De Silva / Portfolio | Place of Work @Flipside | Read my movie reviews punk!
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I could quote several examples, the problem is point in time, that is I know they were AA at a certain date but as they're content managed, are they now? Would rather reply via PM._________________
TaylorMade | @darrent71
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AA was the recommended level for sites funded by the NOF Digitise programme.
Our contribution was http://www.portcities.org.uk/... which should be level A and, hopefully, meets AA for the most part.
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Jim O'Donnell
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Actually just thinking, one of my personal sites was shortlisted last year for GAWDS website of the month - www.edwardjmagee.com another I'm happy with is www.world-furniture.biz_________________
TaylorMade | @darrent71
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It might be worth having a look at the ones shortlisted for the National Library for the Blind's Visionary Design Award. The list is at http://www.visionary-design.org/...
They don't specify any specific level of accessibility, though, just a requirement to "comply with the Disability Discrimination Act by being accessible to visually impaired people, but... also [be] attractive and informative too."
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Tom Shearer
http://www.learndirectscotland.com
http://www.ilascotland.org.uk
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The Post Office site http://www.postoffice.co.uk is aiming for AA with some AAA features thrown in for good measure.
As has already been pointed out, CMS-driven sites may be pretty accessible when they launch but when actual users get their hand on them they may for instance very well decide that "image" makes a nice, standard alt text for all images.
If you find anything that actually breaches AA (not just best practice), please let me know. This only applies to the actual Post Office site. Anything not under "www.postoffice.co.uk" I have even less control of.
--Cecilia
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Clackmananshire Council (ClacksWeb by our own Dan Champion generally has good accessibility. There are some non-relative units for sizing of some layout elements so it might not perfectly satisfy WCAG AA?
My current project (still being refined) is Calthorpe Park School which hopes to be fully AA compliant with a fair amount of AAA. It's not complete (havn't sorted out the acronyms and other little things) although the relative units requirement seems well satisfied. Meaningful markup, headings used apppropriately, etc...seems to satisfy a fair chunk of WCAG already.
The post office site doesn't resize, therefore causing accessibility barriers to people with browser viewport widths below the fixed width of the layout. The fixed height of some graphically bordered sections respond badly to text resizing, causing the content to overflow the border and overlap text content below it. There's no link to skip directly to the main content, meaning the users of keyboards and assistive technologies have to plough through a lot of header content before they can read what the page is actually about.
There's a huge number of validation errors throughout the website, which makes the pages perform less reliably in browsers. Limited devices such as handheld browsers and PDAs can crash due to invalid markup (I've seen this happen first-hand). This is a very real accessibility barrier, as well as being rather annoying!
The use of markup could be improved, with more widespread implementation of list structures and headings. Some form fields don't have a <label> element specifically for them. Various little improvements like that, all of which aid rendering in assistive devices.
I'd recommend making a Site Critiques topic for it (I'll be doing for Calthorpe in about a month's time). It's great to know that at least one person at the Post Office realises the importance of accessibility; by creating a Site Critique topic you could show decision makers the advice you've recieve from other specialists on this forum. They might be impressed that you've managed to get some professional review of their website for free!
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My CV type thing and my Life of Ben (Blog). Nigel Peck's Accessify Forum Requirements.
Last edited by Ben Millard on 15 Mar 2006 03:37 pm; edited 1 time in total
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| Cerbera wrote: |
| Clackmananshire Council (ClacksWeb by our own Dan Champion generally has good accessibility. There are some non-relative units for sizing of some layout elements so it might not perfectly satisfy WCAG AA? |
do you mean px? They are relative according to the css spec.. Even if you follow the argument that they're absolute, I think by using them in margins etc you're hardly breaching the spirit of checkpoint 3.4.
Although this checkpoint for me is in need of a good shake up and clarification...
having said that if he's using cm, in, or pts, give him a slap...
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Strictly speaking, all units are relative to something. A metre is one millionth of the distance along the Earth's surface between the equator and the North pole, making cm a relative unit. Inches are based on imperial measurements, such as the yard which was the distance from the King's thumb to his noses (a system derived from the Cubit, which was relative to other dimensions of the current ruler). Inches are sized to fit equally into yards, as such they are relative to the King's dimensions. Centigrade is relative to the properties of water under normal Earth atmospheric pressure.
This strict interpretation isn't particularly useful when making websites, although it is technically correct.
The notion of absolute units in the context of web pages is a distinction based on the user's control over the unit. The size of a pixel is relative to the size and resolution of the monitor, but changing these is extremely difficult and interfeers with other applications...plus the former is expensive! Units are considered absolute if the user cannot usually control them with their browser.
Pixels, points, centimeters, inches and some other units are considered as absolute in the context of making websites. Although their use in margins and column widths doesn't make the site fail to display in any device, the display won't adapt as reliably to the viewport it is being displayed in. The primary area this affects is readability, making it an issue for all users.
Pixels are only useful when using fixed sized content, such as images. Ideally these images should be resized proportionally with their containing element, but the simple CSS to do this has unpredictable effects in IE6 (what's new?). Browsers generally don't apply advanced smoothing to images resize using CSS, so they often look crappy and any text can become illegible. Therefore, pixels are probably the best unit for display images, for the time being.
Units which whose size is easy for the user to alter include percentages (easily adjustable by browser width) or ems (easily adjusted through browser text size modifier or zooming functions) and some other units which are less useful. By using relative units, the page will adapt to the user preferences more reliably and provide the user with greater control over page presentation. Using percentages in horizontal margins allows intuitive control of column widths by changing the viewport width, while setting padding and borders with ems ensures spacing around text is proportional to the size of that text.
Relative units are an accessibility optimisation rather than a make-or-break requirement, which I guess is why they come under AA compliance.
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My CV type thing and my Life of Ben (Blog). Nigel Peck's Accessify Forum Requirements.
Last edited by Ben Millard on 15 Mar 2006 04:02 pm; edited 1 time in total
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| Cerbera wrote: |
| Units whose size is very difficult to adjust are considered absolute, since the user cannot usually control them with their browser. |
I agree with most of what you're saying* and I also tend to think of pixels as absolute, but that css spec as produced by the W3C does specifically define them as relative.
*although not all of it, obviously
Therefore while I'd argue it would be better to have a fluid site with scalable fonts, according to the spec I could not say it's an outright fail of the checkpoint. I would suggest it's not how you should interpret that checkpoint - as per my article - but as an out-and-out "fails 3.4" I don't think it holds water.
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Jack Pickard The Pickards Information Services| Blog | Twit
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| Cecilia wrote: |
| The Post Office site http://www.postoffice.co.uk is aiming for AA with some AAA features thrown in for good measure.
As has already been pointed out, CMS-driven sites may be pretty accessible when they launch but when actual users get their hand on them they may for instance very well decide that "image" makes a nice, standard alt text for all images. If you find anything that actually breaches AA (not just best practice), please let me know. This only applies to the actual Post Office site. Anything not under "www.postoffice.co.uk" I have even less control of. --Cecilia |
Hmm. Validation is blocked.
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