Accessites.org
Woking Borough Council

The Woking Borough Council site is one of the best UK council sites that we’ve seen in a long time. Good looking, highly usable and mostly accessible. Given that councils, faced with huge amounts of information to publish, often struggle with the design elements of their site, our immediate impression was just how coherent this design is.

We particularly liked the use of key colours for each site sub-section, which we felt, not only made for a bright attractive design, but also added visual user support. Whilst we have seen this technique used elsewhere, we think that it is particularly well executed on this site and we appreciate the additional extra work that has gone into making it so. It was also obvious to us that a fair amount of care has been devoted to the site’s typography — especially the page headings which are extremely clear and easy to read. The site’s navigation was also a pleasure to use with the paths to information remaining very clear, consistent and intuitive.

However we wouldn’t be doing our job properly if we didn’t unearth some flaws…

One of our biggest areas of concern is the site’s Contact form which is significantly below the site’s overall standard. The complex 4 step submission process. The nested table layout. The offscreen positioned legends replicating page content. We also noticed whole blocks of form navigational content, inside the form, that has not associated with form controls so may be missed by some screen readers. We’ve seen far better and in the overall context of the site, this form is seriously sub-standard. We also question the value of such a complex form (and path) to contact the organisation — especially when a blank form could be submitted without generating any errors or warnings!

Title attributes are used, across the site, to simply replicate link text — a practice that is unlikely to provide anything useful whilst simultaneously bloating page markup. We think that their usage needs to be trimmed back extensively. Data tables are adequately marked up but suffer from the addition of inline style. Some of the data tables we examined don’t appear to linearise very well and are pretty much unusable in non-graphical browsers.

The alternative style widgets at the top of every page could have been useful but, as they stand, they are confusing. Users will have no clear idea of what each widget does unless they try them and we aren’t big fans of “accessibility by trial and error”. Text links rather than images might have served better here.

With images off and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) on, we discovered two problems with the site. Without directly referring to the page’s meta-title, the site’s identity is unclear whilst the buttons at the top overlap and become unusable. Meanwhile, with CSS off and images on, the lack of space between images and text may create some readability issues. Onfocus link highlighting for sighted keyboard navigators is generally very good with one notable exception - the organisational logo, which acts as the home link on underlying pages. Given the excellent support elsewhere, we believe that the lack of focus highlighting here will hit users that much harder.

Finally, as with many sites in this sector, there are a significant number of Portable Document Format (PDF) documents on pages across the site but not every page containing PDF files also includes a link to download Acrobat Reader. We think it makes sense to place a “Download Acrobat” link on every page where it may needed.

Had this been a much smaller site, we might have been more conservative when it came down to deciding an award level. However, given its scale, there is no doubt that the site is very impressive. It has a well considered and appealing design and we fully appreciate that achieving this standard in a multi-author situation is very challenging.

The Woking Borough Council was crafted by Andrew Green and, following review, was deemed eligible for an Award Level of: “Quality Universal Design.” Congratulations, Andrew!

Filed under The Showcase, Quality Awards —

Bookmarking Links » del.icio.us | Digg | blogmarks | Ma.gnolia | StumbleUpon | Technorati | Help |

These posts may be related:

Introducing the PWAG »