Accessites.org
Le Web Accessible

Le Web Accessible, the web site of web accessibility consultant Jean-François Naud, offers numerous touches which demonstrate a solid accessible web site. The site exhibits conscientious application of semantic HTML and headings, links are clearly evident on mouse-activated hover, and the layout is streamlined and simple, keeping distractions or potentially confusing content sequences to a minimum.

The site offers what appears to be effective help information, including a site map, privacy statement, and extensive information on the use of various site features. It’s hard to judge these perfectly on the basis of an automated translation, of course, but the general content of the help pages is fairly clear. We’re always glad to see a web site which has conscientiously authored purely information pages to help site visitors use and understand the site.

If Le Web Accessible was an average business web site, the level of accessibility demonstrated by the site would be more than satisfactory.

Unfortunately, this web site promotes web accessibility consulting services. As such, we believe that the site should exemplify the very best of web accessibility in every facet — and that’s not something it quite manages. Abbreviations are only expanded in title attributes, which greatly limits their value for keyboard navigators. It’s particularly disturbing to see a site glossary which fails to ever explicitly expand the abbreviations defined. Similarly, no strong focus states are established for link behaviors — again causing problems for keyboard navigators. In general, the keyboard support this site offers is fairly poor.

In addition, the site offers mobile and print style sheets. Normally, this would be praiseworthy — but in this case, the style sheets are in fact too buggy to offer any real benefit, and users may be best served by disabling them, if they can.

The Le Web Accessible site was designed by Jean-François Naud and, following review, was judged eligible for an Award Level of “Notable Design.” Congratulations, Jean-François!

Filed under The Showcase, Notable Awards — Trackback,

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