The Wardman Wire

During the design of the “magazine” style front page for the Wardman Wire, I have been looking into website accessibility. This article is an initial - rule of thumb - look at my own website and Politics Home.

I’m wondering about organising a series of articles on this subject, so I thought I’d start by applying the two simplest “quick” accessibility tests in the world to a few websites:

1. Turn off Javascript and see what happens.
2. Turn off images and see what happens.

I thought I’d start at home, that is with my own Wardman Wire blog and magazine and with the new Politics Home website. I’ve included full page screen dumps (apart from the first Wardman Wire one - which I have truncated). I’ve also made a couple of notes with each set of screen-captures.

(If you are going to look at all of these, then I suggest opening each in a separate tab and coming back with a cup of tea - several are files of almost a full Mb).

The pages as they should appear

As is traditional with blogs, the Wardman Wire has a very long page at 4500 pixels (this screenshot only shows the top half). Other UK Political Blogs can be up to 10,000 pixels long.

It is not relevant to accessibility - although it doesn’t help it much - but I quite like the “sliding shutter” controls on the left of the Politics Home site. “Black holes” in these screenshots are where flash movies cannot be captured.

The pages without images

All three sites lose their video.

Politics Home: loses it’s “Politics Home” logo, loses its background, loses a number of graphs, and has a number of headers on the left without ALT text explaining the sections, but has ALT text on everything else.

The Wardman Wire loses it’s header and a number of “decal” images, but can be navigated using ALT text. The “mininav” links’ ALT text (top left) turns out to be in Spanish.

The Wardman Wire Magazine loses images and its header slideshow.

The pages without Javascript

Politics Home loses its right hand column completely, but the left hand column “unwraps” gracefully.

The Wardman Wire loses its MessageSpace adverts, but keeps everything else. There is no Javascript on there except for the ads and statistical monitors.

The Wardman Wire magazine has it’s right hand column “unwrap” in the same way as Politics Home’s Left column, and loses its header slideshow - which instead displays the text associated with each image.