Thanks again for your followup. Responses below: On Sun, 13 Mar 2005 10:28:04 +0100, Richard Bennett <richard.b@gritechnologies.com> wrote:
Well, as you seem to be accenting improving usability, I think having an accessible site would probably be worth investing some extra time in.
Accessibility and usability are not the same thing, but are both incredibly important goals for me. Many of the techniques used in the redesign were to enchance the accessibility of our site and so the issue that your previously cited is a probably non-issue, as it was pointed out, since the text is there even if for sighted people nothing shows up.
Also, using an image with alt attribute inside a link with title attribute would probably be more straight-forward than using the current text-replacement thingy...
Something worth considering. I try to use images as absolutely sparingly as possible and the reason why I didn't just images with alt tags in this case was to avoid the need for three separate images on the homepage. The alternative, I suppose, would have been to use one image with an imagemap, but that didn't really seem like a good idea either, since I plan on swapping out that image at some point. Ultimately, I'm sure that there are a number of other things I can do to make the site more accessible, so I appreciate your feedback. What I would love is feedback from folks who do use accessibility devices to browser websites... what is the experience really like? I'm using a Firefox extension called Fangs to help guide my development, but there's no substition for real people's feedback. Chris