[Gllug] Barbican website - accessibility issues

[Wulf Forrester-Barker]

Mike <mike at coruscant.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> 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.

It doesn't have to look boring if you dress it up with some CSS -
stylesheets can add a certain amount of 'zing' while still maintaining
wide compatibility. There's some good stuff on this and links to helpful
sites at:

http://www.bluerobot.com/ 

I've used these sort of ideas in all the sites I maintain. For example,
my home page has now done away with all tables:

http://www.web-den.org.uk/home/

A server-side browser detect script makes an initial choice of
Graphical or Text-based mode but in either case the design doesn't leave
the user with a lot of layout based stuff to get through before reaching
some actual content. Another implementation of the same philosophy is
at:

http://www.lovesjones.com/ 

(my band's website - shameless opportunism in plugging our debut gig on
4 December ;-)

You do have to sacrifice a lot of potential layouts that could be
achieved with Flash or complex nested tables but in most cases this is
not necessarily a bad thing. The other common factor of my websites is
that all the pages are dynamically generated - using PHP, I wrap the
content in the design, which means that the plainer version contains
exactly the same information as whizzier ones. There are all sorts of
things you can do with PHP and the like, but from my perspective one of
the key benefits is simply making sites easier to maintain.

Wulf



wulf.f-b at uhl.nhs.uk 

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