WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: New WebAIM Site Released

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jun 12, 2006 12:50AM

On Sun, 11 Jun 2006, Jared Smith wrote:

> WebAIM is happy to release a new site design and new content -
> http://webaim.org/

I'm afraid my first impression is that it isn't very accessible. Too many
menus. Where do I start? A top menu, a left menu, and lists of links with
headings are essentially navigation, too. Many links are not underlined,
and links do not differ sufficiently from text by color.

_I_ am confused, and I know what webaim.org is basically about, and I can
use a graphic browser normally. How about people who have no previous idea
of the site or who have special problems in orienting themselves in a
jungle of menus and links or who cannot use a graphic browser? The main
page is all too big, too much content, too many links. It would take quite
some time to listen to it in its entirety. It doesn't fit in a browser
window even in fullscreen mode. (Need for vertical scrolling is of course
acceptable on most pages, but main pages should be viewable without
scrolling.) The red backgrounds of headings hurt my eyes.

Didn't you consider creating a prototype or a test version and ask for
comments on in this list or other public review? Sorry if you did -
somehow I missed it.

> We are also introducing additional community tools, including a blog and
> web-based forums. While this e-mail list will continue to function, we invite
> you to also participate in our web-based forums.

Aren't you splitting the discussions that way? If the forums are not
linked to each other, you will have people discussing the same topics in
different forums. There are fewer participants than a single forum would
have, and anyone who really wants to have his question answered will post
it to different forums. Issues will be discussed without knowing what's
going on elsewhere. This list hasn't been excessively active, and it would
have been a much better idea to create a good web interface to the list.

It seems that this list is getting a secondary forum, as the main page now
says: "If you have comments or questions, please post them in our blog
posting."

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/