> Mr. Gray:
> 
> Its interesting to see your viewpoint.  If this is such a bad 
> website, can
> you please provide the Museum-L list links to websites that 
> meet all of the
> criteria you have listed.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> -- 
> John W. Kelton

The _content_ of the HTML site is great, and I enjoyed it, but it was difficult even for me (and my vision is pretty good), because here at work I am using a 15" TFT screen with a resolution of 1600 x 1200, so the text was very small and I could not make it bigger (this is a well-known 'feature' of Internet Explorer). And of course the point for web sites is that you can't in principle know what kind of device / OS / screen resolution / browser window size / colour depth / etc your visitors are going to be using, so you need to avoid designing in ways that will by their very nature lock some people out. This is in addition to the legal requirement in both the US and the UK to make sites accessible to all. The coding of the site in question is very poor, but would be straightforward to fix, though obviously it is better to do things right in the first place. Remember I was talking about the minimum standards for accessibility, not the maximum. This is unfortunately all too common with museum and other websites. 

I don't have access to my bookmarks here, but one site I remember which meets a high level (much higher than the minimum I am talking about) of accessibility requirements and contains a large quantity of rich content is <http://www.theglasgowstory.com/> (I have no connection with this site). Note how the site will re-size to whatever size of browser window the user has, and how the text can be re-sized, so that, for example, someone with a visual impairment can have very large text and still have the full design in a full-screen browser window. The site design degrades gracefully in older browsers while still allowing all visitors access to the content (which is, after all, the purpose of a web site).

You might want to look at books by Jeffrey Zeldman ('Designing with web standards'), or take a look at www.zeldman.com (valid and 508 accessible); and take a look at anything by Eric Meyer on CSS (www.meyerweb.com). If you want to test sites for valid code go here: <http://validator.w3.org> (the World Wide Web Consortium's validator), and there's a useful accessibility checker here: <http://www.cynthiasays.com/> (I prefer this to Bobby, as the reports are more easily comprehensible).

I suppose people will now be wanting to see something I've done -- but I would point out I am a curator, not a graphic designer, and we have no budget here for web design companies. Still there's this which I put together in an afternoon last year:
<http://tour.prestongrange.org/> which is the site supporting our mobile phone tour of Prestongrange Museum.

Best wishes

Pete
-- 
Peter M Gray
Museums Officer




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