Dani Iswara .Net

Web Accessibility Learning from GAWDS Award

Congratulations to Little Blue Plane site. They have been awarded GAWDS (The Guild of Accessibility Web Designers) Web Accessibility Award. The winner was decided by GAWDS member votes. As a best practices on web accessibility, we can learn from the winner’s site.

The full review is written on Little Blue Plane gains GAWDS Web Accessibility Award, First Quarter 2008. Here are the points:

• very clean site, minimalistic, easy on the eyes
• visible skip links
• simple & conventional navigation
• excellent in accessibility
• clean code, markup structure
• liquid layout
• usability features, such as switchable contrast, changeable text size, link highlighting (current focus for tabbing keyboard users).

Read the full criteria on Dani Iswara .Net blog post, Kriteria Universal Design Award dari Accessites.org (in Bahasa Indonesia).

Additional status based on my point of view (homepage only):

• W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) markup:
  • W3C markup validator: valid XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) 1.0 Strict
  • Validome.org: valid XHTML 1.0 Strict with remarks:
    • first remarks:
      

      This XHTML 1.0 document was delivered with MIME-Type text/html. This MIME-Type should not be used, if the document does not correspond to the HTML Compatibility Guidelines.

    • second remarks:
      

      No encoding declaration found within this XHTML document.
      However the validator found a Meta element containing some information concerning encoding (utf-8).
      This kind of encoding declaration will be not processed within XHTML documents, it is useful for downward compatibility to HTML.
      Please add either a XML declaration containing a encoding information at the very beginning of your document (z. B. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>, or prompt your server to send an appropriate HTTP-Header (example for PHP users: header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');).
      As no valid encoding declaration found, your document was processed via fallback to UTF-8.

  • W3C CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) validator: valid CSS 2.1 & 3
  • Accessibility checker (by machine)
    • by Cynthiasays.com: failed on WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative), passed on Section 508
    • WAVE test: no error
    • ATRC (Adaptive Technology Resource Centre) - Web Accessibility Checker:
      • Conditional Pass on all guidelines (BITV 1.0 Level 2 — Germany Standard, Section 508 — US Standard, Stanca Act — Italy standard, WCAG — Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Level A & AA, WCAG 2.0 L1, L2 & L3),
      • Fail on WCAG 1.0 Level AAA (1 problem)
    • Feed validator: not valid
    • Scored 100 by SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Analyzer
    • Web Page Speed Report:
      • Total HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) requests: 21
      • Total size: 62167 bytes (confirm to SEO Analyzer)
      • No HTTP compression
    • W3C Link Checker: found 21 anchors. Valid anchors.
    • Colour contrast analyser (Firefox extension): no fail.

    Did I miss some nice tools?

    Several blog engines (WordPress, Drupal, Symphony) has a commitment on web standards, accessibility and semantic issue. It is more easy now since the web designers and developers have shared their W3C standard compliance themes for free.

    Web accessibility concern on health related sites (at least they passed Section 508 validation and have an ‘accessibility statement’ page) can you find on:

    • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
    • Dept. of Health (England)
    • Dept. of Public Health (Oxford University)

    See also these websites in Asian region:

    • Philippine Web Accessibility Group
    • Web Standards Malaysia (WSMY)
    • Web Standards Group Singapore
    • Yayasan Mitra Netra