Albemarle County Public Schools
- Date Accessed: August 14, 2003
- URL: http://k12.albemarle.org/
- Content: Content is available on the homepage in the form of links and news briefs.
Web Standards
- HTML 4 or XHTML validation: DOCTYPE! was included for HTML 4, with 29 errors.
- Text-Browsing: Much of the content is available, albeit in a disorganized form, with several [INLINE] graphics
- Proprietary Code: Macromedia Javascript used for rollovers
- Editor Used: ? Fireworks and Dreamweaver
- Number of lines of code:491
Style Sheets were used, but syntax was incorrect for some definitions; in other parts of the page, FONT tags were used to control appearance. The abuse of FONT tags is apparent between lines 416 and 435, a thick grid of FONT tag definitions.
Usability Concerns
The rollover graphics in the center, for different classes of visitors is unique; however, the rollover itself is confusing. The casual visitor may spend time focusing the mouse over a specific word, when in reality the words underneath are not links at all, but descriptions of what exists at the one link. This page is basically a huge list of links to the prodigious amount of content available at their site. Yet, there is still too much text to read and with too many areas harboring links, one doesn't know where to start. More suitable would be a representation that didn't repeat links, and more importantly, showed folks the structure of the site. To compound all the options, a gigantic list of links in the form of a pull-down menu is provided.
Interesting at this site was a page with "standards" to be followed at their site: http://k12.albemarle.org/NewHome/NewPages/webstandards.htm. The "standards" turned-out not to be the ones we're testing-for here. Curious were the instances where they did not follow their own (good) advice. Some pages hadn't been updated since 2000 (Keep your Pages Up to Date), spelling errors were found, and screen widths for the main pages viewed for this study exceeded 640 (but were safely shy of 800 pixels across, a modest range for today's browsers).
The changing graphic atop the webpage is a good idea, however the opacity of the pictures and layered approach made depicting the scenes behind the words difficult.
Accessibility Concerns
A structural layout would help with the text-version of the site, which would also help those using a screen reader. ALT attributes should be used with images to describe what the image is, or use a NULL value for the ALT attribute if the picture is structurally insignificant. I had difficulty in getting pull-down menus to work in a later version of Lynx. Those areas of the site were off-limits.
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Copyright © 2003 by John G. Hendron. All Rights Reserved.