sdesign1
The sdesign1 site is a fine example of an accessible website. It’s clearly written, well laid out, and it looks great too! The element that most impressed was the text-resizing: For a three-column/100%-width layout this works a treat when bumping up the text-size a few notches. In addition to this we found the site was easy to navigate with a keyboard because the designer had made use of the :focus pseudo-class on anchor tags. In contrast, though, there was no :focus on form fields.
It was noted that great effort had been made to provide functionality that doesn’t exist in Internet Explorer, like support for the abbreviation element, for example. However, this attention to detail was somewhat tarnished when some basic issues remained, such as missing fieldset and legend on the search form, no robots.txt file, no character encoding and a confusing, button-like Search label. All in all, though, it’s a clean and effective site that works hard so that visitors don’t have to
The sdesign site was crafted by Phil Smears and has been granted an Award level of: “Quality Universal Design.” Congratulations Phil!
Mel Pedley responds:
Posted: March 6th, 2007 at 2:06 pm →
This is the kind of site that has the “the more you use it, the more it impresses” feel. With the exception of a couple of oversights mentioned above, it would make an excellent role model for designers who are relatively new to the field of web accessibility.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: March 6th, 2007 at 3:29 pm →
Definitely a solid site
Phil Smears responds:
Posted: March 7th, 2007 at 3:05 am →
Many thanks for the write up Blair and positive comments Mike and Mel!
I’ve taken action on all points above except the search label. It has a background colour to ensure its readability when background image changes and I didn’t realise this made it look like a button. I guess it will have to remain there for time being until I revisit the graphic design.