Comments on: New National Trust site: Accessibility failure?

By: Sheila

Sheila — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 15:09:55 +0000

I have only taken a quick peek at the homepage but my immediate thoughts
are:
- what if I have never heard of the National Trust? What country are we talking about here?
- naughty to use Tables for layout; what happened to CSS
- bottom panel with navigation mixed in with info on the owners is messy
- behaviour of that bottom panel on mouse-over in Firefox is odd
- where are the headings and real text for search engines to latch onto?
- behaviour of the text ‘Neptune walks’ on mouse-over is odd
I fear it is somewhat lacking in usability, accessibility and search engine optimisation.

By: Simon Pieman

Simon Pieman — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 09:30:12 +0000

I totally agree with the points raised Paul. The left hand navigation on lower level pages seems to work pretty well but the critical higher level nav is appalling. It has taken me a good five minutes of hard looking to work out what is really happening on the homepage. We know that real website users will not invest this time in trying to work out how a site is meant to work.
What a pity that the trust have missed out on such a fantastic opportunity to create a stunning, usable and accessible website.
It would be nice for someone from the trust to comment on the points raised.

By: Paul Boag

Paul Boag — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 21:55:28 +0000

I thought I would pass it by the Accessify forum and see what other people thought. You end up thinking it is just you being bias. This is the thread for those that are interested.

By: Barbara

Barbara — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 21:53:08 +0000

Well, it's fixed width, seems to rely on Javascript, uses tables for layout, uses black for a link colour, doesn't indicate visited links, default text size is rather small, uses images for text (so those words don't resize). Am I missing something ? They say they've made it accessible for everyone --- perhaps there's a different set of accessibility guidelines somewhere that I don't know about.

By: Marcus

Marcus — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 20:55:44 +0000

I was wondering how the 50% of users who use search as their main method of navigating websites will feel about the complete lack of search on such a large site. Again, another backward step. Bitter and twisted also ;-).