As an exercise, I decided to see if I could make the-allens.net homepage compliant with bobby. As you can see if you click the link, it is now. The page in question is a simplistic page with just a menu, a header, an picture and a line of text, but I still had to make changes…
The user-visible one is that I have added a | between each menu item at the top. This doesn’t look too bad in my opinion, but is clearly not an option for all sites. I can see the point in that without separate it would look like one long link. However any text-to-speech reader would point out each word’s link before speaking the next word and a text-based browser like lynx shows each link distinctly as you move the “current link” around.
The other changes I made were clarifications behind the scenes:
- added a lang=”en” to the <html> tag
- added a background colour to the h1’s css style
- added a longdesc=”” to the images used on the page
The first two I can understand, but the last one?! What’s the point of supplying an empty attribute?
Of course, the rest of the site isn’t bobby compatible though it’s usable in Lynx. When I do a re-write, I’ll try and remember to sort it out then.