Special Awards
HUMANITY ACCESSIBILITY AWARD
Adactio
LEAPFROGG SEARCHABILITY AWARD
Cactus Language
The special awards for searchability and accessibility reflect
key issues in web design. Whilst the winners of the main categories
are decided by voting these awards are given by experts in their
respective fields.
This page explains how the winners were decided
and the criteria used to judge accessibility and searchability.
HumanITy Accessibility Award
Technology is a vital part of the world we live in. But what if
a person can't grasp the concept of left/right or up/down on
a computer monitor. How easy would the Internet be to use? What
if an individual only understands a few thousand words, would he
or she understand a Government document? What if the website they
use is designed in such a way that they can't even access it?
HumanITy was established
in 1997 to draw attention to the social exclusion caused
by the increased use of information technology - they believe that
accessible information is a matter of civil rights not social policy.
HumanITy does not want technology "dumbed" down - but
instead made smarter and inclusive of the largest segment of the
population as possible.
The Accessibility Award has been judged for the past four years
and is based around ten criteria:
- Bobby certified/W3C guidelines [19 pts]
- Access the data, ie
home page has a text link to rest of site. [13 pts]
- Purpose and
resources of site clear with no more than 9 links. [13 pts]
- Description
of graphics using the 'Alt' tag. [13 pts]
- Possibility to alter
the colour foreground and background. [9 pts]
- Possibility to alter
the size and font of the print. [9 pts]
- Simple navigation and
route to home page. [9 pts]
- Arrest scroll [5 pts]
- If non adjustable at least 12 point sans
serif font. [5 pts]
- No extraneous material (eye candy) [5 pts]
- TOTAL 100 PTS
Rosario Garcia-Luque has conducted the judging for HumanITy
every year. She has seen a marked change in ecah year, as accessibility
becomes a more mainstream part of web deisgn and this year was
notable in that the winner achieved the first ever 100% score!
Whilst ostensibly fairly simple the winning site - adactio.com - includes a blog, gallery and various details about the work of
its author, Jeremy Keith. It is easy to navigate and well designed,
with adjustable type sizes and clean clear use of colours.
Six other sites were highly commended, each scoring 87%, which
highlights the high standard of all the websites judged:
Leapfrogg Searchability Award
Search engines have become the key gateway to most people's use
of the internet and anyone designing a site must be aware of their
needs. Search Engine Optimisation [SEO] is a new kind of internet
business which focuses on site design to help achieve maximum visibility.
Leapfrogg is a Brighton-based
SEO business. Ben Ringsell and Rosie Freshwater are the two main
business consultants and they checked each of the sites nominated
for the awards using a number of criteria:
- Textual content [10 pts]
- Page Tags [10 pts]
- Spiderability [10 pts]
- Link Popularity [10 pts]
- Spam techniques [up to 10 pts] The site is given 2 points for NOT employing
each of the 'illegal’ techniques:
Keyword stuffing within the meta tags
The use of invisible text
The use of doorway pages
Cloaking
Adopting mirrored sites
As Ben and Rosie point out these criteria reflect good practise
in web design, rather than following trends or trying to fool
search engines. Their services emphasise the need to adopt these
good practise as an integral part of site design whilst making
sure the site is as focused as possible on key content.
The three shortlised sites came within a whisker of each other:
RealBrighton
Face
Media Group
Cactus
Language
And Cactus Language won it by a nose...
Thank you
A big thank you to Rosario from HumnITy and Ben and Rosie from
Leapfrogg. The success of the Special Awards is down to their hard
work and expertise. |
