Web Wrestling at SXSW

Are you a lean, mean design machine? Do you long for the opportunity to design web sites the way you know they should be: accessible, usable and standards complaint? Does your organization care more about cheap, fast results rather than quality code? Then it is high time for a web wrestling smack down in SXSW style! Liz Danzico, Giorgio Brajnik, Bob Regan, Steve Guengerich and I are ready to wrestle your web demons to the ground.

While we perfect our best wrestling moves and eye the underbelly (source code) of our opponents, we want to challenge you to throw websites into the ring. Perhaps you know a site that could rip all other sites to shreds. Or maybe, you know of a site that is so bloated and lazy that it is just askin’ for my best wrestling move, the flying corkscrew clothesline.

So, don’t be shy, shout out the URL of a site that fits our profile of Good or Wicked. And then stand back and see which sites we choose to put through the gauntlet of accessibility, usability, information architecture and standards compliance.

Good
Accessible, Usable, Semantic, Standards Compliant, Elegant
Wicked
Brick Wall, Confusing, Bloated, Invalid, Ugly

Come on…get up and fight…you shivering junkyard!

6 comments

  1. Gah!

    I keep forgetting SXSW comes this time of year. I really need to get proposals in before they’ve finalized all the speakers… I have a lot to talk about this year, too.

    Fooey.

  2. Shawn, some of the best conversations at SXSW occur in the hallways and at the parties. Sooooo….just make sure you are at SXSW! You are coming….right?????

  3. Tickets go for what, $20? Yeah…probably not.

    I’d try to convince my company to send me if we didn’t have a product (basically the one they’ve made me responsible for) launching at the end of March. So until then I live in the glorious world of crunch time.

  4. just to add another twist to the accessibility debate…

    with all the hype about ajax i’ve been wondering about ajax accessibility issues. having just learned a little ajax I spent part of last weekend testing out some code I wrote and some other people’s sites on my wife’s screen-reader (my wife, being blind, uses Jaws 6.0). while I didn’t notice any particular technical issues with the ajax imported content, I did notice that a lot of sites that are ajax based seem to have some major accessibility issues. Is this a case of accessibility wickedness?

    with that in mind i submit a couple of well-known sites… good? wicked?
    http://dhtmlnirvana.com/ajax/ajax_tutorial/
    http://protopage.com/v2

  5. Jeremy, I love your question. And I’ll be running these examples through my own accessibility gauntlet. Thanks for the suggestion.

    My hypothesis…ajax can be accessible, but it will take additional testing and design to get it there. Ideally, any web page should be functional with javascript turned off. But I don’t want to make a user turn javascript off just to make things accessible.

    I’ll research this and get back to you with more delicious details.

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