[thelist] site check (accessibility)
Eike Pierstorff
eikes.lists at dynamique.de
Tue Nov 1 19:16:27 CST 2005
Dear List,
I'm looking for suggestions on how to improve accessibility for the
following site:
http://juedisches-museum-berlin.de/weihnukka/index.html
http://juedisches-museum-berlin.de/weihnukka/index_e.html (english version)
I hope I did some things right - font sizes are scalable, I checked all
background/font color combinations with a color contrast analyzer, there
are alt- and title-tags for images/links, the site is valid XHTML 1.0
(the client edited the content, so this might no longer be true on every
page), link texts are as meaningful as possible - but there are probably
lots of things I could have done better.
Aside from looking for general suggestions I have a few specific questions.
The client supplied some bits of flash, some eye candy for the start
page and a flash game. I use a dom script (Unobtrusive Flash Objects
from http://www.bobbyvandersluis.com/ufo/) to insert them into the page,
is this a good way as far as accessibility is concerned? Nobody really
seems to know how screen readers respond to Javascript. And what would
be a good replacement text for a flash game to blind users - most
accurate would be "you need a flash plugin and at least one good eye to
use this". I'm looking for something that's meaningful to a blind person
and not actually offensive. And as a word of warning, the flash movie on
the start page will eat up all memory on your computer in approximately
60 seconds. There's really nothing I can do about it except telling the
client (I did).
Navigation: WAI Guidelinks suggest to use the tabindex-attribute to
create a logical tab order through links. The default order of the links
seemed logical enough to me, so I didn't use tabindex. Is that okay or
should I still use it (and if so, why?)? And is it okay that pages link
to themselves in the navigation? I think I remember it really isn't, but
cannot find any guidelines that cover this.
Then there is a little game where visitors have to answer four
questions; there are three answers to each questions and they have to
choose one with a radio button. Choice forms are supposed to have a
pre-selected element, but this does not make much sense in the context
of the game. User agents are supposed to preselect the first element if
none is selected - visual Browser don't (and least the one I've tested
don't), how about screenreaders?
And finally, how's the vote on using definition list for images with
captions? While doing some research I found basically two opinions: Some
people said that definition lists shouldn't be used for images because
this makes semtically no sense, other people said definition lists
should be used because they are semantically the most meaningful markup
for this. It is at times like this that I feel the phrase "semantically
meaningful" should be required to be accompanied by some sort of
elaborate explanation - it seems that it's sometimes just used to end an
argument.
Thank you very much in advance for any suggestions.
-- eike
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