Global Issues
The Global Issues site offers tremendous user support and a remarkable attentiveness to semantic detail. The structure of this site is, overall, well-defined and clear. Visitor support includes optional text preferences, instruction in how to best use their browser via text resizing or alternative navigation, and an excellent 404 error which suggests the most probable pages you might have been trying to find.
Clear error messages and fantastic visitor support earn this site it’s Quality rating.
There are, nonetheless, a few things which we weren’t terribly happy with. It’s a great site — but it could be better! When navigating via keyboard, the site is positively intimidating. The sheer number of links on each page left us wistfully desiring additional skip links so we could at least navigate past some of these links.
The sheer scope of the content on this site is always going to mean that navigation will have challenges. There’s no question that it’s more difficult, by any means, to navigate 700 pages than it is to navigate seven. We felt, nevertheless, that more could have been done to give keyboard navigators (and particularly sighted keyboard navigators) a better chance.
A second major issue we encountered was with color contrast. The navigation menu fails all standard color contrast checks. For some sites, this may have been an instant fail; but given the incredible attention to detail elsewhere in the site, we were willing to let this pass. We certainly hope, however, that Anup will take these issues to heart and make some improvements in this area!
Finally, we weren’t really 100% satisfied with the design. Although the site is clean and functional, we all felt that it was a little lacking in the area of style. The layout is a little cramped, the color scheme a little drab — and the overall impact is just, well, rectangular.
In the future, we’d love to see this site resubmitted with some changes. If the design of the site was given a bit more “flair,” and these navigation and contrast issues were dealt with, we feel this site would have excellent chances at a Classic award level!
The Global Issues website was created by Anup Shah and has been deemed eligible for an award level of “Quality Universal Design.” Congratulations, Anup!
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: December 3rd, 2007 at 5:08 pm →
Congratulations Anup!
Anup responds:
Posted: December 3rd, 2007 at 5:26 pm →
Many thanks for this award. Much appreciated. The criticisms in particular are welcome.
The keyboard navigation for sited users is a good point. I had removed some skip links I had some time ago thinking more about screen reader users instead, as they can navigate via headings for example, and I have quite a few hidden or “label” headings. In doing so I missed out sighted users, so will try to address that.
Thanks also for pointing out that poor color contrast on the nav. I thought I had checked that but must have clearly missed out something.
I accept the drab colour scheme and rectangular design! The cramped heading area for example has been bugging me for quite some time. My only defense is that I did the main layout/design in a couple of weeks at the end of 2004 having just learned about web standards/css-based layout a few months earlier. Hopefully I will find some spare time to improve the design and will resubmit
Joe Dolson responds:
Posted: December 3rd, 2007 at 6:31 pm →
It’s very hard to catch everything - and (I dare say) it’s a fairly common oversight to forget that many keyboard navigators are actually sighted…
Congratulations on your award! It’s a great accomplishment — and we definitely look forward to seeing the next generation.
Craig Francis responds:
Posted: December 4th, 2007 at 4:00 am →
Well done Anup!
Just one question though, for accessites… you talk about the number of links being a bad thin, due to the time it takes to navigate though the page… but I’m just wondering, if that should really be the responsibility of the website developer to fix?
I’m just playing devils advocate here… but if you are primarily a keyboard user, then perhaps you should be using a browser which supports your browsing style… the [tab] key alone is a very poor implementation, as found in most browsers… Opera, while not my browser of choice, does keyboard navigation allot better - by using the [shift] and arrow keys.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: December 4th, 2007 at 8:58 am →
I agree that a dedicated keyboard user would benefit by taking some steps on their own behalf, but supporting the needs of the user comes first (over and above that’s not my job). And we’re used to that sort of thing anyway — IE-xample. A lot of keyboard users probably have the original browser installed on their machine, don’t care or know about upgrading, and didn’t even realize they had a choice. I’ve been a computer user since 1992/93, but I didn’t know about other browsers until I started web development. I wasn’t computer ignorant, but I wasn’t nearly as tech savvy as I am now. If I was trapped using a keyboard back then, I would have probably made due, though inconvenienced by long lists of links, a lack of link focus on most sites, and the inability to resize my text on many sites. So, us making this accommodation seems almost natural. A menu of page lists, the ability to jump to each one, and the ability to get back to the menu. It’s not perfect, but it offers a tabber’s respite. Screen reader users are lucky in this way; they can get all the lists presented to them with a skip list option for each, but the sighted keyboard user dependent on the developer or must switch to Opera and try to figure it out. Offer this “menu” I mentioned might also help visual mouse users since they will be able to digest the content of the page’s link lists, while above the fold, at a glance.
Joe Dolson responds:
Posted: December 4th, 2007 at 10:17 am →
Just to clarify, Craig, we don’t actually say that having a large number of links is a bad thing — it’s a difficult thing. And, in this case, it’s a difficulty which could have been responded to in a more thorough manner. I agree that it would be helpful if any given user actually used the user agent which was most helpful to them, but that’s not at all realistic. In many cases (work environments, for example) the user may not actually have any choice about their tools.
Providing these kinds of additional access hooks does do a service for some. It doesn’t solve the problem for everybody, and it may not even be the best choice for certain situations — but I do think that this falls within reasonable limits of what we might expect a web developer to take responsibility for.
Craig Francis responds:
Posted: December 5th, 2007 at 3:11 am →
Thanks Mike and Joe… I like the idea of a mini-menu to anchor to each of the lists… although from a design/usability point of view (if shown on the page), it must look very different to the other list of links, so users don’t get confused with its purpose.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: December 5th, 2007 at 3:56 pm →
Instead of an actual list to serve as a menu, I like to do something like this example on a site I just redid. It’s not by-passing groups of links, but something like this could be applied to that as well. I like it because it’s useful not only to inform the visitor to that page of what they’ll find there, they will be also able to use the “Page Intro” to get around. Almost all the pages on that site are like that.