Accessible Web Design - D201.22

Marc Audet
Hamden, CT

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Exercise for Week 2: Removing Accessibility Barriers
Hands-On Exercise: Priority One Page Evaluation (Using bobby.watchfire.com)
# Link Single A Accessible Result Listing
1 Fail bobby_aarp.html
2 Fail bobby_amazon.html
3 Fail bobby_emusic.html
4 Fail bobby_websterbank.html
5 Fail bobby_cttransit.html
6 Pass bobby_rsnh.html
Note: The result pages from Bobby seem to render better using Internet Explorer.

Summary

Consider the site for eMusic: www.emusic.com

There are three major types of problems:
  1. Images used as buttons need alt tags.
  2. Images need alt tags and in some cases long descriptions.
  3. Frames need titles, but the issue is a bit deeper. The frames are actually on the left hand side of the page and they are used to toggle and display three panels of navigation links. To make this three-tier system of links accessible would require some re-design in a non-frames setting. To further complicate and confuse the issue, the frames do not span the entire page. There is a lot of content outside of the frames and it is not immediately clear how this page would render in a non-frames browser.
I would improve this page by first providing alt tags as needed, especially where images are used as buttons. As for the frames, I would provide an alternative page with carefully indexed links using accesskey and tabindex attributes to replace the frames-navigation-panels, followed by the remaining text. Finally, I would use the NOFRAMES tag to provide access to the alternative page.
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