[LINK] Australian Open Web Page Scores Mixed

[Tom Worthington]

Staff from the IBM Atlanta Innovation Centre were telling me how they 
designed the web site for the Australian Open in Melbourne
<http://www.australianopen.com/en_AU/index.html>  with
accessibility in mind and with a mobile version
<http://www.australianopen.com/mobile/index.html>.

I ran the home page through the usual tests I get my web design students
to use <http://www.tomw.net.au/2009/wd/>.

The results were not bad, but also not as good as I was expecting. None 
of the problems found appear to be serious and not enough to make the 
web site inaccessible. Some of these are likely to be deliberate design 
decisions, where the automated tests do not reflect the real world, some 
don't matter. But the others are things IBM should be able to fix, with 
a little effort:

Desktop version of the Australian Open web site:

     * Automated accessibility test (TAW): 5 Priority One, 131 Priority
Two and 21 Priority Three problems detected on the home page
<http://www.tawdis.net/tawdis/online>.

     * HTML Validation: 100 validation errors detected
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.australianopen.com%2Fen_AU%2Findex.html&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0>.

     * W3C mobileOK Checker reports "This page is not mobile-friendly!".
Note that this the ordinary desktop version of the page. Even so, it
would be useful if it had some mobile attributes, such as small size, to
make it easier to use on slow wireless and small netbooks
<http://validator.w3.org/mobile/check?task=2010012600242311649&view=cat&docAddr=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.australianopen.com%2Fen_AU%2Findex.html>.

Mobile version:

     * Automated accessibility test (TAW): 0 Priority One, 10 Priority
Two and 1 Priority Three problems detected on the home page.

     * HTML Validation: 10 validation errors detected
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.australianopen.com%2Fmobile%2Findex.html&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.654>.

     * W3C mobileOK Checker scores the page 79 out of 100. This would be
a good score for a standard web page attempting some mobile
compatibility, but is not so good for a web page specifically designed
for mobile devices
<http://validator.w3.org/mobile/check?view=cat&async=false&docAddr=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.australianopen.com%2Fmobile%2Findex.html>.



-- 
Tom Worthington FACS HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/people.php?StaffID=140274