List of Best Accessible Websites

Accessibility
1

I am curious to know what are the best accessible websites out there.
As I suppose you learn a lot from seeing live examples in action.
Does anyone want to share a list of their favourite (accessible) websites?

Travel agencies, supermarkets, banks, public services, media & entertainment would be particularly interesting. :tup:

Compiled list so far:

banks and building societies

http://www.co-operativebank.co.uk (UK Bank)

corporations

http://www.unilever.com/ (goods industries)

cultural (art, music, literature)

http://www.onedayfilms.com color=#336699[/color]
http://www.literarymoose.info/ color=#336699[/color]

charity organizations

http://www.savethechildren.net (children’s charity)

education and academic institutions

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/ (UK university)
http://www.anu.edu.au (AU university)
http://theatre.msu.edu/ color=#336699[/color]

electronic equipment and gadgets:

http://t.polyphonia.co.uk/ (ring tones)

health related (stores and services)

http://www.boot.com (UK drugstore)
http://www.specsavers.com color=#336699[/color]

kids related

http://www.pearlsforteengirls.com color=#336699[/color]

news and media:

http://www.bbc.com (UK media)
http://www.sky.co.uk (UK media)
http://www.channel4.com (UK TV)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk (British Newspaper)
http://www.housedoctor.co.uk/ (TV programme)

online shopping:

http://www.amazon.com/text color=#336699[/color]
http://www.waitrose.com color=#336699[/color]

food and beverage:

http://www.farehamwinecellar.co.ukl color=#336699[/color]
http://www.germanbeerguide.co.uk/ color=#336699[/color]
http://www.morrisons.co.uk (supermarket chain

online tools:

http://www.wikipedia.org color=#336699[/color]
http://www.google.com color=#336699[/color]
http://mail.yahoo.com color=#336699[/color]

politics:

http://www.un.gov color=#336699[/color]
http://europa.eu.int/index_en.htm color=#336699[/color]
http://www.whitehouse.gov color=#336699[/color]

private and public transport:

http://www.easyjet.com color=#336699[/color]
http://tube.tfl.gov.uk/ (London Underground)
http://www.emyrevans.co.uk/ color=#336699[/color]
http://www.opt.dtup.sa.gov.au/ (Public Transport - AU)
http://www.transportarchive.org.uk/ (Transport History - UK)

science and nature:

http://www.noaa.gov color=#336699[/color]
http://www.iop.org color=#336699[/color]
http://www.treesbyapex.com (tree surgeon)

sports:

http://www.tankwilliams.com (US football)
http://www.golf.uk.net/

information technology related:

http://www.funwithxp.com/ color=#336699[/color]
http://www.mozilla.org color=#336699[/color]
http://www.opera.com color=#336699[/color]
http://www.kde.org color=#336699[/color]
http://www.plone.org color=#336699[/color]
http://www.osnews.com (it news)
http://happypenguin.org (linux games)
http://www.ubuntulinux.org color=#336699[/color]

more to come - I’ve barely started
will carry on later …

Please object/protest/suggest/debate about more links being included (or bad ones to be deleted).

For this thread I will avoid accessibility-related websites and services.
As well as website designs, consultancy and tutorials, personal homepages, blogs - which are far too many - would overshadow this - and they rightly deserve their own thread :slight_smile:

If a site is accessible but is heavily dependant on non-accessible external links - I won’t include it here.

2

In theory, most university / education websites in the UK should be accessible, as the developers have SENDA to contend with.

Obviously, some are better than others.

3

ha ha ha sorry just help me up from the floor!

4

I’ve been searching for the wider-public accessible websites
it’s very hard!

I only found one:
http://www.eu2004.ie/templates/homepage.asp?sNavlocator=1
apparently all such EU websites conform

I can’t find any online stores, banks, etc …
nor an online directory yet.

maybe there are sites that do conform but don’t have the accessibilit stamp on?
i got just a feeling http://news.bbc.co.uk is accessible

5

Lots of websites CLAIM accessibility compliance, however, reality is a different story.

A visually impaired friend told me that www.sky.co.uk was pretty good.

6

there should be a database or index of websites that are accessible
probably there is one?

also if they put the WIA or WCAG stamp on
they should register - just so that people with difficulties can
choose a service from their databases.

I will search more.

7

Hgilbert and everyone here, you might would like to have a look at my web site: http://www.webnauts.net
I am permantly testing and improving it, to keep it up to date.

8

that is incredible i was there the other day! - looking for out more accessible sites.

what I am looking for is a directory - of all accesible sites
specially in the UK, specially for the wider public
rather than just specialized services (ie accessible holidays, etc).

so far i heard sky.co.uk and i guess bbc.co.uk are somewhat accessible site
to some degree.

but because many sites are not certified it is difficult to discern.
i wonder how many more are out there

a full directory of accessibility approved (even without them knowing)
would be a plus.

my feeling (please correct me) - is that a site can be made accessible without intention (ie complying to standards, providing a text-only version, etc)
but having a site be AA or AAA definitely requires awareness by the webmaster.

Still I am curious if a directory of accessible websites can be built:
banks / travel / shopping …
I was thinking in building such a database
but i am coming to this sad conclusion that the vast majority of sites are all inaccessible.

9

http://www.silktide.com/sitescore is an overall site checker, but to rank well, you need to have accessibility.

1 www.chevrolet.com 9.6 - Report | Vote
2 www.sthelens.gov.uk 9.6 - Report | Vote
3 www.opera.com 9.5 - Report | Vote
4 www.w3.org 9.5 - Report | Vote
5 www.456bereastreet.com 9.4 - Report | Vote
6 www.cssbeauty.com 9.4 - Report | Vote
7 www.simplebits.com 9.4 - Report | Vote
8 www.alistapart.com 9.4 - Report | Vote
9 www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk 9.4 - Report | Vote
10 www.stopdesign.com 9.4 - Report | Vote

10

brilliant !! thanks

that site helps because it has a section just on accessibility
i added news.bbc.co.uk to see how it would score.

11

In some aspects, it was very good, however, it also has some very serious shortcomings. For instance, it doesn’t pickup when a link causes it to be redirected off site (e.g. /links/example.com redirects to http://example.com). Under these considerations, it considers http://Example.com to be the same site, which will screw up ratings. It does make evaluations of Alexa data and does some Google searches, which is interesting, but it doesn’t necessarily make good assumptions about search phrases. In the end, automated tools like this are not a replacement for human evaluation and they are actually of very limited use.

One other thing if my understanding from some other currently active threads here in SitePoint is correct, there is no 2004 UK law about accessibility as is reference on that site. It seems there are some accessibility laws on the books in the UK but they previously existed. I’d love to get a straight answer on this so that we would know once and for all what the truth is and we can put an end to FUD. To often misinformation continues to get spread for financial self interest and it would sometimes be nice to know the where the truth lays.

12

I am curious to know what are the best accessible websites out there.

useit.com :stuck_out_tongue:
I know I know…horrible answer, but it’s true.

ok, but a real answer…

13

Okay, from the horse’s mouth here it is. The DRC (Disability Rights Commission) interprets the law to give guidance to UK business and public bodies (until the law is ‘fixed’ by a High Court case ruling), this is quoted from it’s report Code of Practice: Rights of Access- Goods, Facilities, Services and Premises of March 2002:

The duties on service providers are being introduced in three stages:

· since 2 December 1996 it has been unlawful for service providers to treat disabled people less favourably for a reason related to their disability;

· since 1 October 1999 service providers have had to make “reasonable adjustments” for disabled people, such as providing extra help or making changes to the way they provide their services; and

· from 1 October 2004 service providers may have to make other “reasonable adjustments” in relation to the physical features of their premises to overcome physical barriers to access.

…

An airline company provides a flight reservation and booking service to the public on its website. This is a provision of a service and is subject to the Act.

Hope that clears up the FUD :slight_smile:

14

OK I found this

http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/PublicWebsite/public_accessiblewebsites.hcsp

It’s very very few websites - specially general public services that are accessible.

http://www.waitrose.com being the only supermarket listed.

I wonder how http://www.amazon.co.uk scores

It is very difficult for me - to label anysite A / AA / AAA
first because I am no authority - second because it would require extra tools
(text-webbrowsers may help but are not the only indicators)

but yeah I believe that it would be beneficial perhaps for information and cataloguing sake
if there was a directory also with a table.

another idea would be for the disabled users themselves - or those with specific web-browsing difficulties - to vote for or against a pre-selected list of deemed accessible sites.

I will add a list to the first post.

15

I worked on the chevrolet.com site as a freelancer. Accessibility was one of the primary goals. It was tested with screenreaders and every browser you can think of (including Linux based). Another interesting note is that the site was built entirely with XHTML strict and CSS. After I was done with that project I figured if it can be done with a site that big, it can be done with any site.

16

Yeah, I know it’s a bit off, but it gets the general idea. As the reply above me, Chevrolet is actually very well done.

17

I sent them a suggestion to smarten their tool up a little to detect redirects like I mentioned above and to obey the robots.txt file, as these would help it better understand what a real human would see or understand. Besides, which, all automated processes that try to index or scan a site should obey a site’s owner’s wishes as they are specified in the robots.txt file.

For instance I’ve had a major problem with bad bots that ignore the robots.txt file (like spam bots that look for email addresses) and users trying to cache my entire site creating denial of service attacks on my site because they try to index it too fast. These bots and users have driven up my operating costs as there are around 20,000 pages on my site and they have a habit of trying to suck every page of my site in a very short period of time. My solution has been to implement a bad bot trap that humans would never see (regardless of browser) and bots that properly checked the robots.txt file would ignore, but bad bots and end users’ site caching programs trip up on immediately. Once tripped, this trap will set a database entry that only allows the IP address/useragent in question to grab a page every so many seconds and if they grab too fast, they get a 503 error. The time frame is such that even if a human user did trip the trap, they probably wouldn’t be affected by it. This has tremendously reduced DOS issues and bandwidth consumption. At the same time it has only caught one legitimate bot (I check frequently), which I programmed an accommodation for. The problem is because of the way the previously mentioned tool works, the first thing it does is fall into my trap. Thus it immediately gets denied access to my site.

18

Yeah, I have a site that automatically converted an article into a linked article (each word linking to a new page), and it took 30 seconds to 5 minutes per page, and Google managed to kill my server. I now cache on-first-view of each page, so hopefully that saves it. Thing is, it’s partially for Google rankings, so I can’t block it out anyway.

Also, spam bots wouldn’t ever obey robots.txt - would defeat the purpose.

19

chevraulet is truly impressive
perfect example of a very beautiful site that is also accessible

it doesn’t look pretty on my dillo and text-readers
but “pretty” should never matter when down to that stage
it does degrades gracefully however on non-stylesheet browsing
and so it is still readable.

i think dillo and text-readers gave me the erroneous impression that
table-layout was after-all a good thing (otherwise you get but one vertical summary)

for me its difficult because I lack other tools such as screen readers
so am dying to know how tabular design affects and/or disturbs accessibility
(specially screen readers)

i’ve been aiming for tabular design using the blasphemous <td> table tags but
conforming to xhtml 1.0 strict and css 2.0

I really fear I could be doing this very wrongly - need to get hold of a screen-reader or have a group of people or formal institution test my sites when Im finished.

20

Neither would user based site caching programs. Thus they are so easy to pick off.

I added the IP addresses of SiteScore and W3C’s validator to my exceptions list and signed up for a free account with SiteScore. Other than it still counting off site pages in my score, it has been very helpful in finding odd little validation errors. I did come up with a method for dealing with its redirect method. I simply pointed the ad link in question to a sub-domain I had previously set up for similar purposes and set the redirect from there. Since the sub-domain was a different site, it didn’t evaluate that link.

Based on twenty-five pages it evaluated I actually ranked pretty good:
Marketing (How well marketed, and popular the website is.): 9.4
Design (How well designed and built the website is.): 9.9
Accessibility (How accessible the website is, particularly to those with disabilities.): 9.3
Experience (How satisfying the website is likely to be.): 9.9
Visitor rating (Average user rating for this site’s design): No votes
Overall Summary score for this website. 8.8