Treasures of the Battye Library voted Site of the Month, January 2005

The GAWDS Site of the Month is a monthly award which recognises a website demonstrating great accessible design. The aim of the award is to promote a vision of the future that assumes accessible Web design to be relevant, obtainable, and not at odds with successful business practice or good visual and usable design.

Each month, nominations are sent in and short-listed to the best five nominations. GAWDS members can then vote for their favourite website based on their opinions of the accessibility and general design of the nominated websites.

GAWDS members have voted Treasures of the Battye Library the first Site of the Month for 2005. This attractive and well-presented website was designed by Australia-based Cadmium Design & Development.

Snapshot: the Treasures of the Battye Library website.

On winning this month's Site of the Month, Dr Ronda Jamieson, Director at the J S Battye Library of West Australian History, commented:

“The J S Battye Library of West Australian History is the repository for all information about Western Australia, except for government archives. Our collections date from exploration in the 17th century to the present day. Included are very many treasures, and we wanted a website to feature a small number of these to give people a feel for the treasures we hold, which belong to all Western Australians.

“The Friends of Battye Library is a support group and they agreed to fund the creation of a website – both for research and writing the content, and for the website design...

“We gave [Cadmium] complete freedom to create the design with a brief for it to be uncluttered and easy to navigate. The very first design [that was] submitted fulfilled this brief to a high standard. We were absolutely delighted.

“Provision of services to people with disabilities is important to us, and we are therefore particularly pleased that the design is considered to be outstanding from an accessibility point of view.

“We have had nothing but positive feedback from anyone who has commented – no criticisms of any nature. The State Library's website expert considers it one of the best designs she has seen.”

Alexandra Graham of Cadmium Design & Development was very happy with the award:

“When Cadmium Design & Development was established just over two years ago one of my goals was to show that it was possible to adhere to web standards and accessibility guidelines without sacrificing design quality and this award for the Treasures of the Battye Library website from the Guild of Accessible Web Designers brings us close to achieving that goal.

“As a web designer and developer I have always felt that the web should be available to everyone. It provides a level playing field and opens the world up to allow communication and collaboration where it never existed in the past, so to be recognised by my peers, all of whom have a similar vision for the web and those who use it, is a great honour.

“This website is the first Cadmium has produced that makes use of CSS alone for formatting and layout with no use of tables whatsoever and a definite goal of achieving a high level of accessibility. Based on the response to the site to date this will become the standard for all our productions in the future. We are very happy with how the Treasures website has turned out and I am honoured to accept the January 2005 Site of the Month award. Thank you to everyone who voted for the Treasures of the Battye Library website.”

A very close second place in January's poll was the Wrexham Science Festival website, built with the primary objectives of being level AA Accessibility and having fast download speeds. The other sites nominated this month were ProShare Student Investor, Their Reading Futures and Menzies Chartered Accountants.

If you would like to nominate a website that you think deserves recognition as a prime example of good, accessible design, please use the Site of the Month nomination form.

Contributed by Jon Gibbins



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