WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

WebAIM Site Redesign

Wow! It’s finally done! It has been about 9 months in the process, but our new site design is finally live. We’ve written an article documenting our process and many of the decisions we’ve made and hope it might be of benefit to you in designing or redesigning your own accessible sites.

If you have comments, recommendations, or find problems with our new site, please leave a comment or contact us.

Comments

  1. Dennis

    Very nice. Excellent example for an attractive, organized, and well-coded accessible web site. Glad to see the blog and have already got it in my RSS reader. Great icons in the blog and activity lists on the homepage.

    A few suggestions: 1) Create a hidden heading for the top navigation (products, services, etc). 2) In the footer, create the bullets with CSS rather than inserting the special characters. This further separates content from style. 3) Remove white background on “skip to main content” link. I agree that making it viewable on the page is fine, but does it have to stand out that much?

  2. Kerry

    Great site. I appreciate very much the detailed explanations of your thought processes as you updated the site. One suggestion: I really like the idea of an icon to designate external sites but you should still consider opening external sites in a new window to further differentiate them from your site and to minimize confusion.

  3. Jared Smith

    1) Create a hidden heading for the top navigation (products, services, etc).

    I debated doing this, but ultimately came to the conclusion that it would probably just be overhead. The navigation is the first menu items on the page after the skip to content link and it should be obvious that it’s navigation. I’ll do some more testing and thinking about it. Perhaps others could chip in with their opinion on this.

    2) In the footer, create the bullets with CSS rather than inserting the special characters. This further separates content from style. 3) Remove white background on “skip to main content” link. I agree that making it viewable on the page is fine, but does it have to stand out that much?

    I’ll fix both of these when I get back from @media – my internet access time is pretty much limited to a seedy internet cafe upstairs from a rather aromatic Indian restaurant. 🙂

  4. Jared Smith

    One suggestion: I really like the idea of an icon to designate external sites but you should still consider opening external sites in a new window to further differentiate them from your site and to minimize confusion.

    Thanks for the comment, but new windows should usually only be opened if the user chooses to open them. It is not default browser behavior and may actually be MORE confusing for the user to have the pop-up window. We flag the external links so the user can open them in a new window if they choose to (CTRL + click or CTRL + Enter with the link active).

    I wrote about this a while back at http://webaim.org/techniques/javascript/other.php#popups

  5. Accessibility 101

    How is the forum coming along?

  6. Jared Smith

    How is the forum coming along?

    We have both the E-mail forum and the web-based forum. The e-mail forum continues to be a popular resource, with well over 1000 subscribers. The web-based forums are slowly picking up. It’s a bit difficult to get a forum community up and running, so head over there and start posting!