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Re: web site to review

for

From: Simius Puer
Date: Aug 19, 2009 12:35PM

Hi Robin

Done a quick run-through for you.

General usability:

A little padding in the left of the main content area would make it a little
easier for visual readers - text butting tight-up against colour changes can
be awkward in some instances.

A max-length for content lines should be defined. On very large screens
some content becomes very long and hard to read (especially paragraphs).

Equally, increasing line-height to around 120-130% has shown to increase
readability for the majority of sighted users..

Accessibility:

There is no real reason for the navigation to be a table...CSS controlled
text/list would be more suitable.

ECC is a pretty obvious abbreviation but it isn't expanded using <abbr> as
far as I can see. No immediately obvious explainable of ECHO.

Tables (e.g. Board of Directors) could do with a summary="" attribute

Newsletters are in PDF which are typically far less accessible than HTML (I
won't be drawn into that argument - and yes I do know the nice people from
Adobe are here) so should really be converted. Failing that they should at
least have meaningful link text. e.g:

current: "May 2009"

should really be: "May 2009 - HHM Housing Fund for Linn County and
CompuPlace Health Clinic (415kB PDF)" (note: HHM needs an <abbr="whatever">)

Meta description would be useful. Helps users of assistive techonology and
regular users alike determine more about a pages relevancy in search
results.

There is plenty of in-line styling and occasionally badly formed code - plus
use of the depreciated <b>. Validating the page shows you where most of
these are. It also highlights that attributes have not been quoted and
single part tags (e.g. <br>) have been marked up as HTML not HXTML (e.g. <br
/>).

The contact form needs some attention. It allows erroneous submissions
without warning users and upon completion simply reloads the page (a page
saying "thank you - your message has been sent" is an expected standard. Not
all fields have a <label>. The use of a table for layout does not help
much...consider switching to a CSS controlled layout.

Looks like the heading levels are a little messed up on some pages - not a
big issue, but easy enough to fix.

Bug:

The skip nav is broken, not because of anything wrong in Firefox, but simply
because you have an ID defined twice (not allowed).

Hope that helps. Have a good day!