Accessites.org
2006 August

The Cynasky Web Multimedia web site is striking, very easy on the eyes, and makes a great first impression. There is obvious talent behind the development and design, and we like that. Digging, though, revealed some problems that really impacted the usability and accessibility of the site. More care must be taken in these areas! That said, though, and after seeing the previous pure-Flash version of the site, the improvements are striking and we’re very pleased to see the new direction this developer is taking. We really have to say molto bene; keep up the good work.

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The Wachenfeld & Golla web site was obvious to the assigned graders that it belonged to a designer at heart. The site, while made in a blocked form like many, smoothed things out with a softness and openness we really liked — clear, clean, and well presented. It also had a fair amount of clever well-used bells and whistles. It also showed us some oversights we just didn’t like, but all-in-all, a really sweet website. Provided in two languages, we love the extra mile the developer went to make it available.

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Some people wonder how we grade sites. Obviously we use our Checklist, and it helps a lot by giving us step-by-step direction, but the process is quite involved. It’s actually more difficult than any of us had ever envisioned when we first launched this project. It involves many hours of work. Of course we knew some of this going into it, though new challenges we didn’t anticipate have presented themselves. Thus we want to better explain the process and describe the new obstacles in hopes that you can help.

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According to a recent poll on a big web design forum, the knee-jerk reflex of most web designers, when asked to design a new website, is to fire up Photoshop. To another group of designers, this will seem like a rather backwards approach; they will mark up the content, semantically, before applying the layout and design. Does the choice of approach — visual vs structural — have any impact on the accessibility or usability of the site? Will there be any aesthetic differences between the two? Visual designers see a web page as an image: the colours, shapes and images define the page; the content is something that populates the various areas of the image. This is a design-centric view.

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