[Gllug] Barbican website - accessibility issues

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Tue, 2002-11-12 at 14:49, CEvers at barbican.org.uk wrote:
 
> However, I think you are absolutely right that we should be aiming to meet
> the needs of all our audiences (within reason), and it is something that has
> been discussed inside the organization.  I would like to assure you all that
> this is something we want to work towards.  One question the Barbican has to
> come to a view on, given its inevitably limited resources, is, where should
> we start?  I'll come back to this point shortly.

With a text only version of the site. Boring, but it addresses all
visually impaired users, and not just a subset of them, which is what
you'd get if you aimed for a "simplified" version of the site.
 
> On the second point of browser compatibility, as I mentioned in my original
> email, at the time the site was designed, Opera and the others were off the
> radar.  And much as I agree with the point made by Gary Heaton and Will
> Jessop that making the site compliant with W3C standards will make the site
> compatible with future developments in the browser industry, I do believe
> that an arts site has a duty to be visually interesting/aesthetically
> pleasing - would this be possible if we followed W3C standards to the
> letter?  I'm not convinced.

I run Linux on my home and work machines. I use Mozilla exclusively as a
browser, and all the users at my office run Netscape 7. I've seen lots
of sites I consider aesthetically pleasing, and I've seen nothing which
leads me to believe the IE extensions serve any valid purpose other than
vendor lock-in. I really don't believe that following W3C standards
would limit your site in any significatn manner. You may have to
approach some problems differently, but that would be all.

> So getting down to details, what concrete steps should the Barbican be
> taking to evolve its website in the broad direction you and I agree we
> should be taking?  I would like to invite 3 or 4 of you down to the Barbican
> for a chat about this (tea and biscuits on me) - how about Gary, Will and
> Linuxlover - I promise not to wear a 'Gates is God' t-shirt.  If you have
> members who act as representatives for this kind of exercise, even better -
> but please, no businesses.  (Naturally, you are all welcome to email me back
> as well.)  So, over to you.

Well, ironically, http://www.barbican.org.uk looks OK to me in Mozilla.
Of course, I've never seen it in IE, so I've no idea whether what I'm
seeing is what the designer intended, but there's nothing obviously
broken from my cursory glance.

Mike.


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