The New EDUCAUSE Website

Hi All,

If you haven't noticed by now, EDUCAUSE has unveiled its new website.  So... what do you think?

Please keep your comments constructive. To focus our discussion, I recommend that we consider two pages in particular:

The home page
http://www.educause.edu/

This accessibility hub:
http://www.educause.edu/library/accessibility-persons-disabilities

I'll start with the positive:

1. I love the larger font size and high contrast on headings and navigation menu items. As a person with aging vision, I find this design to be much more comfortable to use than its predecessor.

2. Heading structure isn't bad. It's not perfect (e.g., too many headings, a few empty headings), but generally I think the overall structure and order is logical. 

As for problems, the biggies from my perspective are the dynamic features such as drop-down menus and slideshow features. There's no ARIA at all on the new site, and with these rich features it's a great example of a site that needs ARIA. I think the features I've mentioned are Drupal modules, which raises some interesting questions:

 a) Is there an accessible Drupal module that provides the same or similar functionality to those selected? (same question for other CMS's too)

 b) If the module chosen isn't accessible, is it better to scrap it and do without that feature, or work with the open source community to improve the accessibility of that module? Those of us who are using open source CMS's, are any you taking the latter approach?

Cheers,
Terrill  

--
Terrill Thompson
Technology Accessibility Specialist
DO-IT, Accessible Technology
UW Information Technology
University of Washington
tft@uw.edu
206-221-4168
********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.

Did not do a deep, deep dive, but it looks great and navigates beautifully, did not review for accessibility and look forward to hearing from folks who have experience from that perspective.  Tracy

Message from lgreco@berkeley.edu

The page is attractive and much more usable to sighted users. I'd like to have our screen reader expert have a look at this.

Message from burke@ucla.edu

>Screenreader user here... On the Accessibility page, just "under" >the h1 page title I find some links/buttons: Previous, Pause >(toggles to Resume), Next. But I have no idea what they are controlling. That's on: http://www.educause.edu/library/accessibility-persons-disabilities (Using that unlikely combo: Jaws 13 with IE7, for the moment...) Patrick -- Patrick J. Burke Coordinator UCLA Disabilities & Computing Program Phone: 310 206-6004 E-mail: burke@ucla.edu Location: 4909 Math Science Department Contact: dcp@oit.ucla.edu ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.

One other comment. 

Message from lgreco@berkeley.edu

I saws the same thing and a little lower on the page some interesting frame title and a numbered image Lucia Greco Web accessibility annalist University of California Berkeley http://webaccess.berkeley.edu

Message from shelf@westernu.edu