Information Design
Topline Review:
FAIL
According to most tests, the site fails Accessibility Standards
Website as accessed:
April 1 - 16, 2011
http://www.clarke.public.lib.ga.us/index.html
Reviewed By:
Joanna June
Good accessibility design means that the website conforms to good website coding practices to be readable and useable code for all browsers, as well as accessible to users with disabilities. By the standards of a variety of web applications (mostly those found in this list of top tools), the ARLS website fails to be accessible and validated. The screen capture above shows that when run through the W3C HTML Validator the main page (the HQ index page) has 27 Errors and 18 warnings. For the most part, alternative text needs to be added (to “href” links and images) and code needs to be cleaned up, so that the website better conforms to W3C standards and, more importantly, is more useable to those with disabilities.
Not Accessible
As can seen in the video on the right, EvalAcess, found a fair number of problems with the main page.
Twelve Errors were found at the Priority 2 level. Half of those errors were the use of the W3C deprecated “Font” feature.
83 Warnings at Priority 1 level were also found, the majority of which were items missing alternative text or ability to access in a monochromatic color space.
The errors should certainly be fixed and alternative text should be added (as also indicated above).
The “Plain Text Menu” is a nice nod to accessibility but falls well short of expectations. The link is positioned in a place of prominence on the main page (see the picture above - the link is just above the navigation bar in purple on the right) but it is unclear how the page itself is helpful. The page consists of a poorly prioritized and unclear list of links that go back to full-graphic pages. When run through WebAnywhere (see video below) the accessibility and usefulness of the page is called even more into question as only a small portion of the links are read by the assistive technology simulator. First and foremost the page should be re-scripted such that it works with screen readers. Then, perhaps a page-view counter should be added as a test to see how often this page is accessed and a judgement made if it is actually necessary or helpful to users.
