[thelist] site check (accessibility)

[Eike Pierstorff]

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