quality universal design award
accessites.org awards the quality universal award to our website, because it looks good and is highly accessible
we are very happy about this prize! accessites.org rejected 130 submitted websites so far – and we are the first “non-english” one!
The Wachenfeld & Golla website was obvious to the assigned graders that it belonged to a designer at heart. The site, while made in a blocked form like many, smoothed things out with a softness and openness we really liked — clear, clean, and well presented. […] Provided in two languages, we love the extra mile the developer went to make it available.
accessites.org
this accociation wants to prove that accessible, usable websites built with universality and standards in mind need not be boring.
grading
there is an elaborate checklist every submitted website has to pass – here are some of the most important points:
- is a blind person able to navigate the website? how well does the site sound — as in machine-read? is it clearly read or are there redundancies, choppy sections, and spots of missing information?
- the text must be able to be resized on all modern browsers, including microsoft’s internet explorer, and readable when done so up to two size increases. [you can change the text size of our website by clicking on one of the “A”s – that’s easier for most users]
- how well does the site fare with styles disabled or unsupported? does it render in a logical order? are the various elements and sections still clear?
- can you navigate the website with the keyboard, only?
- is there enough contrast between background and text?
- how well are links marked and displayed? are they intuitive? are they listed when they should be?
- how well does the site fare with client-side scripting, active scripting such as JavaScript disabled or unsupported?
- how complete and available is helpful information like a site map, accessibility statement, privacy policy, site search, print pages? how about custom error pages with helpful resources? is it easy to make contact or do you have to jump through hoops?
- the site must use a cascading style sheet for positioning as well as page styles. no tables for layout. the cascading style sheet must be valid as well, as determined by the W3C CSS validator
- the submitted site must be written to a “strict” document type
conclusion
I was very surprised how much detaill the grader’s worksheets contained – this must have taken a lot of time! I actually could improve a few things because of those worksheets…
accessites.org, thank you very much for all your effort!