WSA Winner
Wednesday February 18th, 2004
Simple thinking is a site that grows on you. The design is subtle and understated, yet it's the attention to detail that really sets this site apart. The designers mix html text, images and flash to create an extremely polished look. An equal amount of attention has been paid to the content, which is written and presented with the sites target market in mind. Under the hood, the site is well structured and makes good use of accessibility features like access keys, tab indexes and skip nav links. On the whole, this site is a fine example of a well designed and developed agency site.
Reviewed by Andy Budd
#1
Did the design change between now and the time that a screen shot was taken? I can't seem to find that page.
While it does look nice and I applaud them for making an effort to be standads and accessibility oriented developers, I also have a small problem with this one as well.
It only appears to be accessible at first glance (simply validating) because most of the images used are CSS backgrounds. Using CSS backgrounds for images in the content instead of the img element allows them to slide past validation without any alternate content (e.g. the list on the home page is a background image when it should probably be a styled ul with a few images and alt text.. or at the very least a solid img element with alt text).
Posted by Damon Haidary :: February 18th, 2004 at 10:19 PM
#2
Thanks for your feedback. The image used here of the Simple website is the top portion of the homepage - we've got some revolving flash movies playing there so maybe you saw one of those instead.
With regards the images, we use a standard image replacement technique that hides content and displays a suitable image in it's place. If you view the source code you will see that list you are referring to is in fact an unordered list that is hidden in browsers that are css capable. We've also used title tags with this method to provide alternative content.
Posted by Richard Hiscutt :: February 19th, 2004 at 11:47 AM
#3
This site is incredible, I really like it. The use of Flash within the site is really nice. The accessibility is easy and obvious. the graphics are subtle and well done. One thing I do not like is the '+' on the front page that links to another page. I do not think a plus sign is a good metaphor to see more, I would think a triangle pointed to the right would be more obvious.
I really want to see some screenshots of the CMS! Looks like a nice site and definitely deserves to be here.
Posted by Danny Cohen :: February 19th, 2004 at 08:21 PM
#4
Ah. I stand corrected.
Firstly, I see the Flash animation now. Had a problem with Firefox that was preventing me from viewing Flash embedded with objects.
Second, I do see that you're providing alternate content. At first I just replaced images with alt text in FF and then validated. Didn't check the source for the alternate content.
Even though you're providing alternate content, it's still not accessible. While the content will appear in a text browser like Lynx, it wont be read by the leading screen readers/voice browsers (and shouldn't be) since you're using "display: none;" to stop it from rendering.
The W3C on the value "none" of the "speak" property in aural CSS -
"Suppresses aural rendering so that the element requires no time to render. Note, however, that descendants may override this value and will be spoken. (To be sure to suppress rendering of an element and its descendants, use the 'display' property)." - http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/aural.html#propdef-speak
The only safe way to hide alternate content is to position it off screen. Even displaying it as 0x0 requires that you set overflow: hidden; which can crash IE 5/Mac.
Posted by Damon Haidary :: February 20th, 2004 at 10:09 PM
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