Technical evaluation
This site on the whole works well, but under the hood there are a few problems.
Everything appears and works as it should, web and email links are solid and largely up to date, the site is generally accessible, and no special plug-ins are required to view the pages. However, there are a few problems.
Navigation
The site's navigation centers around the website's header which features a trio of navigation bars-- the section bar, the special topics bar and the "crumb trail."
The section bar from the front page becomes the website header on inside pages. Each "iconic" person is enlarged when you are in the represented section so it is easy to see what section you are in. There are also library links on every page so you can check branch location and hours or account information readily.
Below that, the gray special topics bar has links to pages such as kids, teens, Maori culture, and e-government. It also allows you to chose the website language and search the site.
The "crumb trail" provides a hierarchal listing of where you are located within the website. For example, the crumb trail for the Readers React page states "Home > Teens > Readers React- reviews for teens." Each section is a link so you could move up levels in the site.
The site's best and worst navigational feature is the contextual menu. Below the header on the left side of each page is a menu that changes content depending your location. For example, when you are on the Readers React page, the left column features the various reading genres. When you are in the e-government section, this bar lists law and government topics. The link to the mother page and section is always listed on top of this column, but the column as a whole changes constantly. (See Hits and Misses)
The center column is always the page content, though when you visit the section homepage, this column features highlights from the section. As you burrow in, this column features the primary content.
Finally, the right column offers a combination of images and related information and links.
Accessibility
There is a link in the footer of each page explaining their accessibility features which is a very good idea. Features implemented include keyboard accessibility shortcuts-- where holding "alt" plus another key takes you to many of the most used sections. They also have buttons to make the print larger and smaller. Both of these features should be mandatory for all library websites.
On the other hand, the site's layout is constructed using multiple nested tables, which can be hard to fathom for someone using a screen reader. However, their method of creating white space makes matters worse. For example, the site?s contextual menus are constructed using tables. Each link has its own table cell. The white space between the links is created not with cell spacing and padding, but with small white graphics. In turn each of these graphics have the alt tag of "null." As a result, a person using a screen reader will hear the word "null" at least two dozen times over the span of a single page. While it is a rule to have alt tags for every graphic, this is one case where I think an empty alt tag would not only be forgivable, but preferable.
The accessibility checks also found a couple form controls that were unlabeled.
In the code
When parsed by the W3C validators, the pages of this site registered many errors which appeared to occur for two reasons.
First the pages lacked doctype information. If you parse assuming HTML 4.01 transitional, there were 60-plus errors. If you parse assume XHTML 1.0 transition, as image tags were written with self-closing tags, you end up with more than 400 errors.
Secondly, the database-driven website uses the "&" character in the URLs. This caused numerous errors as the ampersand is a special coding character. To correct the problem for validation the "&" needs to be replaced with "&"
And the nominee is... / Content Evaluation / Technical Evaluation
Evaluation and website by E.G. Yarnetsky, September 17-23, 2005.