We entered the Museum sector accessibility competition for websites earlier this year, which is an annual event in memory of a girl who was an employee of the British Museum. This is called the Jodi Mattes award, and I’ve worked quite hard to try and make this website much more accessible. We didn’t win, but we did get shortlisted for the prizes, which were listed on the 24 Hour Museum website and included:
- Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery website
- Finds, by The Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS)
- i-MAP ‘The Everyday Transformed’, by Tate Modern
- Their Reading Futures, by the Reading Agency
- The History of Wolverhampton, by Wolverhampton Arts and Museums Service
- Speaking Volumes, by Wakefield Library and Information Service
The winner for this award was the Tate’s sponsored site, which allowed partially sighted and blind people to have access to artwork using raised images, a truly innovative way to serve up cultural content to the world. As for us, I tried to make our site as accessible as possible, as cheaply as possible and at a more basic architectural level. I’ve been heavily influenced by resources available on teh web, including design sites such as a list apart and 456bereastreet. I think that this quote from Robert Nyman makes complete sense:
To me, it is all about making web sites accessible to people with disabilities and at the same time to people using different operating systems, web browsers and devices.
The code for finds.org.uk is now divorced entirely from style, with CSS driving the aesthethics of this site completely, as you may be able to see from the switching style sheets employed throughout the site. This uses PHP code as the driver for this function - see alistapart for further info on this. It’s not difficult, but does create an overhead for maintaining stylesheets several times (so think before doing it!) I haven’t implemented it here on the blog before you say! I’ve also made sure that links are labelled with title tags and with a good semiology, alt tags are filled in correctly and tables are employed as they should be and a print style sheet is used to produce printer friendly articles. This is an easy thing to achieve and should be done by more sites. Far quicker than PDF generation.
There’s certain tools that you can use to aid development of accessible websites; these include:
- Firefox web browser
- Web Developer extension for Firefox
- The Fangs extension for Firefox
- The text-based browser Lynx
- W3C HTML and CSS validation tools
- A range of browsers installed on your machine for interoperable testing (not easy to achieve in a locked down, enterprise environment where Gates is king.
- Accessibility checking tools - TAW, WebXACT (aka Bobby),Cynthia Says
Two other tools that I find incredibly useful are the “x-ray” and “professor x” extensions for firefox (you may notice that I don’t like IE.)
There’s a wide range of other people’s musings on accessibility out there, Robert Johanssen is particularly useful if you delve into his archive. Have a read of his 3 part article on accessiblity benchmarks, and also read the responses to see how peers feel.
You may even recognise some of his tutorials in play on this site. After all, I only fell into technology as a career by accident, so I am still learning!
As for other Museums that have paid close attention to accessibility; the British Museum has implemented audio description of it’s Compass collections and the National Maritime Museum won the first ever Jodi award. There’s more out there that are now trying to meet WACG. But this all harks back to basics - get your webstandards right and the blocks will be solid. There’s a Biblical parable that could be seen as an analogue to this…..Matthew 7:24-27
Saying that, if you find any problems with rendering of this site, please do get in touch with me and I’ll try and fix it. Saying that, why am I writing this at nearly midnight, surely I should do this at work.
OpenCalais helped to tag this with: Art Gallery • British Museum • Hour Museum • HTML • Information Service • Jodi Mattes • National Maritime Museum • operating systems • php • Reading Agency • Robert Johanssen • Robert Nyman • teh web • validation tools • Wakefield Library • web browser • web browsers • Web Developer extension • Wolverhampton • Wolverhampton Arts and Museums Service • x-ray
Possibly related posts: Finds.org.uk shortlisted for web accessibility awards • Jodi Awards 2007 - Call for nominations • Code base upgrade •
