The Wardman Wire

Accessibility and Useability are two features which are necessary for a website in 2008 to be successful, but not sufficient on their own.

Bendy Girl asked about the accessibility features of the designs I am looking at for the Wardman Wire:

I like the light background too, I always find dark backgrounds difficult on the eye and so navigate away very quickly. There are also wider issues re visual impairment/disability access which might be worth considering.

I’ve changed the live copies of both sites to the lighter theme so that you can have a better look.

• The one with just content from this blog is here.
• The one with more general news is here.

On the wider questions, the new front end is (I am told) fully “XHTML” compliant. That means that it *should* be useable with things like screen readers - although they will struggle with a layout that has so many different areas.

When I’m closer to putting it up, I’ll look at features such as Access Keys and the possibility of making a “high contrast” theme-available.

I *could* look at a built in feature to make a read-out copy of each article available as a podcast - but I always feel that that is a bit unnecessary given the existence of screen readers.

An example of a blogger who does that is Andy Carvin, who has a blog called “Waste of Bandwidth”.

Thinking about it, it should be easy to allow the user to switch between “dark” and “light” themes.

Tags: accessibility, theme switch, access keys, high contrast, visual impairment, useability

Further comments are welcome.