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Thoughts on website please! :)

  • 18-08-2013 4:27pm
    #1
    DublinArnie
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,823 ✭✭✭


    Hey!

    Just finished making a website for a competition. Just wondering if there any improvements I could make (background etc). Don't mind the spelling mistakes if there are any as I haven't yet polished the text completely :o. I'm trying to make it as simple and accessible as possible.

    All opinions are appriciated, even the negatives ones! :)

    http://smartfuturesarnie.moonfruit.com/


Comments

  • #2
    uglybunz
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 20 ✭uglybunz


    If you're serious about accessibility then WAVE is the best tool to check your site with:
    http://wave.webaim.org/

    Your site is presently completely broken with respect to accessibility, as its html element doesn't have any lang attribute, so screen-reader software falls at the first hurdle: it doesn't know what language to read your page in! I suggest that you try to set this in your CMS controls, or if it can't be set then you should find a different CMS.

    Also, you don't usually need to worry about styling your pages with high contrast, as most users with accessibility issues will have tools, such as a web browser called WebbIE, that make your site easy to read, so you can generally style your content for users without accessibility issues. Or many just turn styles off entirely.

    The one thing to watch out for are contrast errors: the reason why your menu items are showing contrast errors on WAVE is that you are using black text and your body background is also set to black - you are relying on your wallpaper being in place so that they can be seen (they appear over a grey bar in the wallpaper), but if I have my browser set to not download images then you are presenting me with black menu items on a black background. If I have sight problems then I may prefer to not have wallpaper making text hard to read! So the WAVE errors are real, though they may appear to be erroneous to someone who's not used to working on accessible sites.

    A final HUGE accessibility blunder can be seen if you click on the "no styles" button in WAVE when analysing your home page (or set your browser to not use styles): the header, "Introduction" is BELOW the text! If I'm using a screen-reader to read web pages then I will usually have it set to jump to the first h1 header on the page and then read me the text immediately below that, but on your page there is only a widget below the header! So I would "see" an empty page and there is NO CLUE for my screen-reader to find the actual text! If you read the docs on WebAIM you will see that it says somewhere that "just because your site passes the WAVE tests doesn't mean that it's actually accessible", and they mean things like this.

    But if you 'looked' at your page with WebbIE ( http://www.webbie.org.uk/ ) then you would 'see' problems like this straight away. But be aware that WebbIE tends to take over your system a bit, as it's making itself easy to find for people with genuine accessibility issues, so you might want to install it on your old PC!

    So there you have it, your site completely fails accessibility testing, but I have given you information on two free tools that you can use to make the next iteration 100% accessible!


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