Little Blue Plane gains GAWDS Web Accessibility Award, First Quarter 2008
GAWDS are pleased to announce that Little Blue Plane is the winner of the first quarterly GAWDS Web Accessibility Award. This superb site represents the online presence of GAWDS member Helena Boylen.
The site was shortlisted for the first quarterly award by Accessites along with two other excellent entries by Wachenfeld & Golla and Yalf. The winner was decided by member votes.
The site has a very clean, minimalistic design that is easy on the eyes. The navigation is simple and conventional.
In terms of accessibility, the site is excellent. Aside from its clean code, sensible structure and liquid layout, the site features some little touches that improve usability for disabled visitors. One such feature is the switchable styles that provides higher contrast with enlarged text. For those who want to know how to change text size themselves, there is a page dedicated to how visitors can change the text size using an array of browsers.
A second feature to mention is a favourite of ours: link highlighting. In order to help ensure that the user can see the current focus (caret) of the browser, the site implements a simple link highlighting mechanism that makes the caret easier to see when "tabbing" through links. It could be just a little more obvious, but the fact that it is there at all shows good knowledge and attention to accessibility detail.
Other useful features include:
- Visible skip links that, as they are always visible, can be used by keyboard-only and switch access users as well as screen reader users.
- Decent heading structure.
- A well-labelled contact form that includes information about "required" fields within the labels so as to be more accessible to screen readers. If we could make one suggestion here it would be to not wrap the form fields with the label tags; doing so can make the form fields inaccessible to users of the Window-Eyes screen reader.
All said, the site is a deserving recipient of the GAWDS Award in association with Accessites. We would like to congratulate Helena on a job well done and wish her every success with her future projects.
— Review by Grant Broome and Jon Gibbins
About the GAWDS Web Accessibility Award in association with Accessites
In order to improve the quality of submissions for the Site of the Month, GAWDS partnered with the talented team at Accessites. Each site is checked thoroughly before being submitted for the Award, ensuring that all submissions meet strict accessibility criteria. The team then select some of the best sites to be shortlisted for the GAWDS Award.
If you would like to submit a website for the Award, send your nomination to the Accessites submission page.
If you are a GAWDS member with good technical auditing and writing skills and would be interested in writing a quarterly review, then please let us know.
bozboz web design | Sun Oct 26 2008