www.hungryben.com

29/10/2006 | Filed under Develop > Access all areas

Having an accessible website is more important than ever. Alastair Campbell puts www.hungryben.com through its paces

Hungry Ben is ‘the site of a strange 13-yearold (and his hair)’ and resident .net forum member MrSparkle. It’s amazing to see a CSSbased layout from someone who hasn’t left school yet, and it really drives home the fact that there’s little excuse for those who make a living out of web development!

The separation of structure and presentation (with CSS) is good. Some of the HTML structure could be improved (for example, sub-headings use bold rather than heading tags), and the main heading image lacks all the information it should have in the alternative text, but for the most part it’s accessible.

The main issue I would pick up on is colour for people with colour blindness. Having a dark background is not a problem in itself: if the text contrasts enough then it’s just as accessible as a light background.

How can you tell if there is enough contrast? There is an algorithm from the accessibility guidelines that compares two colours for contrast and colour difference, and the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium produces a little program to help you check colours on a web page: tinyurl.com/jjo94.

There’s no problem with the home page and blog area, the contrast is high and there are no ‘click the red button’ statements. The section of the site that will cause problems is the forum. Red (or green) on a dark background is very difficult to read. For further information on the issues of colour blindness, check out Joe Clark’s book: tinyurl.com/ga7zo.

Most people with colour blindness can happily differentiate most colours, but red text on a dark background makes the contrast very poor. There are ways in which this can be worked around, for example, using a lighter colour for the text would make it easy to read, and the colours for the borders wouldn’t need to be changed for the forum area. Ben has made a brilliant start to his website in terms of accessibility and usability, reading around the areas mentioned will help him to make steps to running a more inclusive website. Keep up the good work!