www.monash.edu

By Gian Sampson-WildManager, Usability and Accessibility ServicesITS Web Centre

Accessibility and the Monash homepage

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Circa August 2006

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Circa August 2006: The good

• “Skip to content” link• worked with CSS disabled• fields labeled• headings used• CSS used to style bullets

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Circa August 2006: The bad

• tables for layout• “Go” button• no navigation labels• ascii characters used

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Circa August 2006: The ugly

• …

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Circa November 2006

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The marketing goals

• “fresher” look• easier to maintain• languages other than

English• based on feedback

and log analysis

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The development goals

• no tables• semantic markup• XHTML• preserve reading order• no browser hacks• standards compliance

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A few problems…

• getting rid of tables• four columns• browser support:

IE 7, NN 4.7• screen width

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New accessibility features

• navigation labels• “Find” submit button• “Skip to the content”• “Search” not capitalised• removal of ascii characters (>>)• relative instead of absolute units

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Challenges

• designers being developers• marketing being

aesthetically driven• IE being a monster

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Why it worked

• marketing / IT relationship• the relationship

between marketing and IT

• how marketing listened to IT and IT listened to marketing

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Questions?

• I’m always happy to talk:

Gian Sampson-Wildph: (03) 9902 0535email: gian.sampson-wild@its.monash.edu.au