www.browneline.com help needed.

dbnavan

Hi all,

I am in the process of creating a website about disability and equality issues people in Ireland face on a daily basis. I am doing this for a number of reasons a) I have cerebral palsy myself so I am very interested in this topic for personal reasons, b) I was recently elected as Disability and Equality officer for Fine Gael in the Meath-West Constituency, and c) I am a computer student and wanted a website to practice what I was learning,

Before anybody says it I know the website has very little on it at the moment however I hope this will change over the coming days and weeks. Here is my plan I will raise topics people submit and try to get some answers off public representatives and highlight their answers.

This site will not be possible without the input of the general public so if you have an issue, an idea for an issue or know somebody who would like to get involved in some way please email me at david@browneline.com I promise to reply to all emails personally.

The first issue being highlighted is Government Payments to People with Disabilities

Regards
David

Talliesin

Could perhaps do with better contrast between text and background colours, in particular the links at the bottom aren't that readable and the "About Me" page.

dbnavan

thank you,

your comments have been noted and taken on board, they are valid! Input I am seeking is more on content then design, no too people will ever agree on how a webpage should look/feel!

D

Amz

I would agree with Talliesin, contrast could be improved. It's not very readable from the point of view of someone with a visual impairment, particularly the white font on the brown background i.e. on the "Contact Me" page and the colours used on the "About Me" page.

Talliesin

dbnavan wrote:

no too people will ever agree on how a webpage should look/feel!

No, I could saw I just don't like the colour brown, but that's not an accessibility matter - lack of sufficient contrast on a site is. See Web Content Accessibility Guideline 2.2

Indeed, given the purpose of the site it might be a good idea to re-read the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines if you haven't read them in a while. While the latest version of the guidelines are still only a working draft, they're worth reading as well, especially given how old the 1.0 guidelines are - one or two are less useful than they were at the time the guidelines were published - and especially if you don't keep abreast of the current thinking within the web accessibility community.

Really, my eyesight is pretty much okay when wearing glasses (not quite 20/20, but not that far from it), and I have a reasonably good monitor set up correctly, but I still couldn't make out the bottom link (for that matter, even when I could, it wasn't clear what it was about when I increased the text-size so I could read it - see Web Content Accessibility Guideline 13.1).

dbnavan

Ok guys the site is still not fully accessible as per guidelines lots of reading to get through there, however i hope you will find the change of colours scheme an improvement, i will make it more of a priority, especially since the site is about disability and equality. I am still learning, all advice is welcome.
Check back now and tell me what you think.

Dave

Talliesin

Give the image at the top alt="The Brown Line" and link it to the home page on all the pages except the home page.

Place the map before the image that uses it in the source code, and put alts on each area, e.g.
[html]<area shape="rect" coords="246,3,291,15" href="news.htm">[/html]
becomes
[html]<area shape="rect" coords="246,3,291,15" href="news.htm" alt="News">[/html]
Better yet, just use text for those links and acceive the gradient effect with a background image in CSS.

All the other images seem to be decorative at first glance, so they should have alt="" on them.

As it is a blind user (or one that just chooses to use text only) won't be able to use the navigation at all. If you keep the images but at least fix the alt issue on the map then a user that needs to increase the text size considerably more than the default size may still find the images hard or impossible to read, hence my recommending that the menu be replaced with text links.

Do read the guidelines I posted above, and indeed if you have an interest in both accessibility concerns and in the web then the rest of the Web Accessibility Initiative section of the W3C site is worth a look at, and the WAI Interest Group mailing list worth joining. As well as being of practical use to improving the site itself, it should be of interest to you. Indeed there is an RSS feed of WAI current news, which you could republish automatically on your site.