Showcase of well-designed accessible Web sites

The purpose of this page is to publicly recognize Web sites that are well-designed accessible sites.

Those sites that are listed on this page all illustrate some of the best ideas in the field of web accessibility. It is our hope that visitors to these sites will learn from the design and layout of these pages. In most cases the web masters and content providers have gone beyond these basic principles and added usability and sound design to their pages.

Below you will find a listing of these exemplary pages, followed by an annotation describing the reasons why the site has been included on this accessibility honor roll. This should help those with specific questions and interests find real online examples of sound, accessible design. So check out the sites, post your congratulations to the appropriate web masters, and learn from their demonstration.

• Testing and Evaluation Home Page

  This site utilizes Skip navigation, ALT-text, headings, and clearly labelled frames and links. Note, too, that these pages, unlike many similar sites in higher education, do not greatly rely upon the PDF format. Instead, the authors have shown a judicious use of PDF, thus maximizing accessibility to users of assistant technology.

• College of Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison

  What is most notable about this site is the accessibility of the college’s newsletter. Unlike the majority of PDFs posted to the net, these PDF files are tagged for accessibility. If you open one of the newsletters, you will see that that images contain ALT text and book marks can be activated to bring you quickly to different content areas.

• Training for Videoconferencing, UW-Extension

  This site provides many choices to its users by including videos in Quicktime and Real Player format. Among other things, it has been made compliant by including links to the appropriate players for download on each page where PDF, Realplayer, and Quicktime files appear.

If you know of a site that deserves recognition, please contact Matt Merrill, who will be overseeing this part of the Web Accessibility for All project.