He would be quite pleased however, with IMC's complete neglect of simple, internationally accepted Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Being sighted himself, he would take one look at the site in Lynx to get an idea of how it would seem to a non-sighted person and just fall over laughing at all the stuff someone using an audio browser would have to listen to to get to the real content of each page. Page after page they would be tormented by the same list over and over again. And they couldn't use their browser's "skip to heading" feature because IMC hasn't marked up the headings as headings. He would be very pleased indeed.

Hey Karl: Haven't spoken with you for a long time. We need to coordinate more, though where I am, the telephone lines are weak and inconsistent. Tell me, hows patriot act II coming. You know, despite my Ukranian nationality I was able to milk Russian nationalism and patriotism for quite a few miles riding the mule of the masses. Anyway, keep me updated.
Yours, Stalin.

All that whitespace in the features section of this IMC is a form of capitulation. It is a pity the editorial committee of this IMC doesn't understand the need to actively resist the current Regime in Washington.

It is bad enough that the features that are chosen are always (either tacitly or directly) confirming various parts of the Bush Regime's propaganda. Now the features section is even more indoctrinating than it has been in the last four years with the editorial committee actually hiding recent features in order to minimize the sense that anyone in Baltimore is resisting Washington.

Charles especially --

The site upgrade -- nearly a year in the making -- should improve the general accessibility of the site dramatically. Please let us know what you think of the changes. (But incidentally, even the old site had an anchor near the top of the page that jumped directly to the Features section, so your comment wasn't entirely just).

As for the Features, we have neither been intentionally "confirming various parts of the Bush Regime's propaganda", nor "hiding recent features". Rather, we had been restricting the Features column to eliminate posts that were so old that they didn't belong on the home page anymore.

"As for the Features, we have neither been intentionally 'confirming various parts of the Bush Regime's propaganda'..."

So, show us an article that has managed to be featured by the editorial committee that challenges Bush propaganda on any point besides the weapons of mass destruction that they claimed justified the Iraq war. I certainly haven't seen ANY such article since 9/11/01 went down.

Thanks.

The site upgrade is a great leap forward. I doff my hat to you. I note in particular the ridding the site of the table layout and the properly marking up of headings. However:

Forgive me for not noticing the "skip to content" link at the top of the old pages; I did look for it though. But we could use it back again. You still have a bunch of clutter at the top of the page when rendered non-graphically ( www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.cgi for sighted persons.) And now that the long list of links is down at the bottom of the page, it might be nice to use, as the first child of the BODY element, Skip to content | Skip to external navigation

It seems to me that the "Baltimore IMC" banner is the CSS background to a transparent image. However you have done it, I need to see "Baltimore IMC" at the top of the page when the images are not presented. And it should be your H1 element: .

But if you do that you will need to drop all of your existing H1 elements to H2 and on down the line.

Your "More..." links are problematic. To get around the page, some users of screen readers, and some users of the graphical browser Opera, call up an independent list of links from the page. Those people need each link text to be unique and to make sense out of context. If you must stick with "More..." for your link text you might be able to assign a more descriptive text to the link with the "title" attribute but I would suggest you look further into that before doing so. You would have to try it out on a few screen readers to find out how they handle it.

You have at the end of the page a long list of links that is marked up as a number of paragraphs with line breaks. You should mark up all lists as lists. (See www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html )

This has nothing to do with accessibility, but your CSS is not valid.

But on the whole, a job well done. Again, I salute you.

Charles

Charles --

Thanks for the hat. It was a long time in the making, and I did my best to struggle between meeting accessibility guidelines and the difficulty of having IE/Win display the damn page right.

To address some specific points:
And now that the long list of links is down at the bottom of the page, it might be nice to use, as the first child of the BODY element, Skip to content | Skip to external navigation

I'll think about this. The only thing before the "content," however, is the main navigation link bar, so I'm not sure how useful "Skip to content" would really be. And "Skip to external naviagation" would only link to the other IMCs...not exactly "External Navigation" generally speaking. But perhaps worth linking to directly nonetheless. (Bear in mind that the new code is really based on a non-IMC-specific codebase, so Media Centers aren't privileged in any way).

I need to see "Baltimore IMC" at the top of the page when the images are not presented. And it should be your H1 element:.

The printheader (normally hidden from graphical browsers) shows up at the top of the page...you don't think that suffices? As for needing it to be the H1 element of the page, I'm not sure I concur...while I have purist tendancies myself, I'm not convinced that the strict Hn hierarchy is appropriate for contemporary page design. It assumes that all information should be structured in descending order of significance, which may be logical from one perspective, but it ignores a wealth of other mental organizational factors. Feature categories, for example, are h3 tags (less important than H1 titles or H2 sub-titles), but are nonetheless presented above the titles, which makes much more sense from an structural standpoint.

And frankly, the page TITLE should be the identifying marker for the site, not the first H1 tag. Your online Lynx viewer does not display the page title anywhere, which seems to me a more serious omission. ;-)

Your "More..." links are problematic...

I did notice that when I was doing Accessibility testing, but I didn't get a chance to address it. For things like Features, it should be easy to remedy, though it might end up looking a bit strange sometimes (if there isn't much of a summary). Using the "title" attribute would seem like a good solution, but it doesn't pass muster with the Accessibility validator...hmmm. Will have to try something else.

You have at the end of the page a long list of links that is marked up as a number of paragraphs with line breaks. You should mark up all lists as lists...This has nothing to do with accessibility, but your CSS is not valid.

Fair enough. The list is actually parsed from XML, and it _would_ be valid CSS, but there's a bug in the XML formatting. Blech. Marking it up as a list would probably solve the problem as well, so I'll look into it...

Thanks for the input!

Oh great, the board ate my mark up examples. Well, you get the idea.

Charles