Accessites.org
The Art of Accessibility

The Raspberry Frog site has a very contemporary, well structured design that compliments both the branding direction as well as the favorable user experience. The brand of the site focuses on the “raspberry” theme quite effectively with the consistent use of the color in it’s imagery, graphics, and text throughout. As well, the overall visual structure of the site makes it simple for the user to absorb the content effectively. This is done by the choice of the graphics used to create the content’s containers, mainly with the secondary content on the left side. As an added bonus, not many sites have their secondary content to the left of the main content. With the visual structure, it works quite well.

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Many sites are built using WordPress (WP) as the content management system (CMS). Not just blogs but full-blown ecommerce sites and others. The power and flexibility of WP is evident by these implementations. And speaking of implementations, it was used as the CMS for a site recently built as a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 implementation, to the level of AAA (one of two in the world with the other being Vision Australia). To learn more about that, here’s a short summary of the experience. This article is about WordPress’s end of things.

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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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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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