Mac Accessibility Advice

[kwilliams]

Our site uses ASP 3.0, JavaScript, VBScript, CSS, and a SQL Server 2k backend. I received the following email message this morning concerning Mac Accessibility:

Is your website Mac-friendly?
Some will not load correctly at all and several links of the website seem to go into a loop, continually reloading themselves when accessing from computers running Mac Classic OS's and Mac OS X. All links appear to load fine from Windows based computers.

Our County policy requires the use of Microsoft products exclusively, so unfortunately I'm not able to test our site through their point of view. I want our site to be as accessible as possible for all users, so I'd like to get some constructive criticism from Mac users in this forum concerning the issues raised by the email. Thanks for your help.

My Site: http://www.douglas-county.com

[AdamGundry]

You've got bigger problems than just Mac users, though any policy that requires you to use one vendor exclusively is seriously broken.

First of all, you need to validate your HTML (http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A//www.douglas-county.com/) and CSS (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?profile=css2&warning=2&uri=http%3A//www.douglas-county.com/). Make sure your site complies with Section 508 (http://www.contentquality.com/mynewtester/cynthia.exe?rptmode=-1&url1=http%3A//www.douglas-county.com/) guidelines. Nested tables are a seriously bad idea, and client-side VBScript won't work on a Mac (or most anything other than Internet Explorer).

Adam

[kwilliams]

Hi Adam,

Thanks for the response. I've actually done the W3.org HTML & CSS validator, but I'm having a problem with the HTML validator. It keeps pulling up a bunch of links as broken when they are infact not broken. So how can I depend of that report? Concerning the CSS validator, I'll use the validator's results to correct the code.

But I'm still confused on why links would loop continuously on a Mac vs. a PC. Any suggestions about any of this?

[kwilliams]

Adam,

I've been working at fixing the CSS errors, and I've run into a problem. The CSS validator said:

...but this is what this tutorial said that I found originally that helped me to create my CSS menu: http://www.projectseven.com/tutorials/css/uberlinks/

And this site also mentions the "behavior property": http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/css/properties/dynamic/behavior.htm

So do you see why the CSS validator would give me that error message?

[toicontien]

You'll have to look at your ASP code to find out if it is excluding or not including the Mac OS or specific browsers. That should cure the Mac problem.

[kwilliams]

The code is not excluding Mac browsers, so I don't know why the links wouldn't work for them. If there are any Mac users out there, please visit http://www.douglas-county.com, and tell me what you find concerning links on the page, and on the CSS navigation bar. Thanks for any advice.