Accessibilty

Reviewing this website design I see that there still quite a few issues regarding Accessibility.

The relevance of providing an "accessible" website has possibly changed due to the prevalence of mobile usage. The importance of a website being navigable by just the use of the keyboard, with no mouse or pointing device, has been eclipsed by the usage of the site using a touch screen.

My site design template currently throws an error when pages are tested using the Wave Accessibility Tool.
The error relates to a Device Dependent Handler, however, this is due to the underlying template design and is not a problem with accessibilty rather than with the evalution method. The control in question is hidden when the page is loaded on a large screen and that is how it is evaluated by Wave.

Identified problems with the current design

The first thing that I notice is that many of the menu items are not initially indicated that they are in-focus. This makes the navigation using a keyboard pretty much impossible. Pressing the TAB key puts the image in the side menu in focus. Subsequent TABbing shifts the focus to the side-overlay menu. The menu items are not made clear to their focus and the drop-down (accordian) elements are skipped.

The top expandable menu is only accessible after a double TAB and then only the top item can be accessed. The dropdowns are inaccesible using the keyboard only. As these are not normally seen on a mobile display this is not really an issue.

Designing for Accessibility - and mobile considerations

Should an accessible site is needed then a different template for the design may need to be considered.

Having said that I have (just) re-reviewed the design on a mobile phone and there are more pressing issues with the design that those with Accessibilty. The menu items on the (now) pop-up menu are accessible and there is no TAB key. However, navigation from this menu needs to accomodated for important pages related to page being displayed. The top menu is not normally visible, unless the phone is placed in landscape, and if it is there will only be limited menu options compared to the desktop rendering.

Europe and Accessibilty

This seems to be more an importance. The accessuse.eu website is an indication of this.