Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Australian Open Web Page Scores Mixed

Staff from the IBM Atlanta Innovation Centre were telling me yesterday how they designed the web site for the Australian Open in Melbourne with accessibility in mind and with a mobile version. Today I ran the home page through the usual tests I get my web design students to use on web pages. The results were not bad, but also not as good as I was expecting. None of the problems found appear to be serious and not enough to make the web site inaccessible. Some of these are likely to be deliberate design decisions, where the automated tests do not reflect the real world, some don't matter. But the others are things IBM should be able to fix, with a little effort:

Desktop version of the Australian Open web site:
  • Automated accessibility test (TAW): 5 Priority One, 131 Priority Two and 21 Priority Three problems detected on the home page.
  • HTML Validation: 100 validation errors detected.
  • W3C mobileOK Checker reports "This page is not mobile-friendly!". Note that this the ordinary desktop version of the page. Even so, it would be useful if it had some mobile attributes, such as small size, to make it easier to use on slow wireless small netbooks.
Mobile version:
  • Automated accessibility test (TAW): 0 Priority One, 10 Priority Two and 1 Priority Three problems detected on the home page.
  • HTML Validation: 10 validation errors detected.
  • W3C mobileOK Checker scores the page 79 out of 100. This would be a good score for a standard web page attempting some mobile compatibility, but is not good for a web page specifically designed for mobile devices.

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