Accessites.org
SnowDog

Kuba Zwolinski’s SnowDog web site is an excellent example of a meld of unique design and standards-based web accessibility. The aged-paper and tape motif is elegantly put together, resizes well, and just plain looks great. From an accessibility perspective, Kuba has clearly put some thought into the site’s underpinnings. The site is easy to navigate by keyboard, since links have strong :focus states and are well-organized. The site also makes use of a script to allow users to set their own access keys, which is a great way to offer custom keyboard shortcuts.

There are a few problems which we noted while discussing the site, however. The brown-paper-bag backgrounds which serve to add a great graphic effect to many major headings have the unfortunate effect of also being extremely low contrast, which could cause problems for people with low-vision. Graphical links frequently only have the default dotted-outline for a :focus state, and there are some usability problems with the site contact form. We all agreed that although the AJAX effect used to display form error messages was cool, it was dismaying that we were not able to dismiss the error using the keyboard.

One reviewer particularly noted that each page of the site had non-unique meta data. We talked about this, and decided that although we felt that each page should have a unique meta description, it was simply not an accessibility issue. The meta description is important, but to the best of our knowledge it is not used in any special way for accessibility purposes so it’s a minor concern at best.

In the end, we felt that the excellent design sense and careful attention to detail on the SnowDog web site by Kuba Zwolinski deserved to be awarded at the Quality Universal Design level. Congratulations, Kuba!

Filed under The Showcase, Quality Awards —

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