We aim to prove that accessible, usable web sites built with universality and standards in mind need not be boring. We will show you artfully crafted sites made by some of today’s most progressive web developers. Join us in honoring them and the sites they meticulously and lovingly build. If you know of a site that meets our criteria, please submit it today!
Welcome to Accessites.org
Wrangling Widgets
Sooner or later, you’re bound to come across an article, or blog entry, that talks about text size widgets
. What exactly are these widgets and are they of any real use? A text-size widget is a link, input or user control that allows users to view the site via an alternative style sheet with a larger, or smaller, relative font. The widget itself may be a short piece of text such as “Large Text” or it could be a small icon. Some sites offer a whole range of small, medium and large ‘A’ icons that change the text size. But, at the end of the day, it has to be said that this kind of accessibility option does replicate functionality that is probably best accomplished through the user’s own browser. So do these widgets offer any practical user support?
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Accessibility NZ
The Accessibility NZ site, (NZ for New Zealand,) is a well-constructed, simple approach to accessible design. The site clearly demonstrates a firm grasp of the fundamentals of accessibility. Looking under the hood shows a very clean, efficient use of markup with a bare minimum of necessary tags. No extra fluff here! The simple design offers a few graphic touches which help make the site interesting without adding distraction to the layout.
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User-Centered Design and Usability: Its Role in a Project
The role of the User-Centered Design (UCD) process is vital to the success of site and/or application development yet it remains something of a foreign concept. It is also frequently bundled in with “Usability” and tacked on to the end of a project instead of taking its proper place as the underlying foundation. So, what is User-Centered Design and how should it be applied?
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Woking Borough Council
The Woking Borough Council site is one of the best UK council sites that we’ve seen in a long time. Good looking, highly usable and mostly accessible. Given that councils, faced with huge amounts of information to publish, often struggle with the design elements of their site, our immediate impression was just how coherent this design is.
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