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Portfolio
Access Summit
Freelance Web Development for Nornir Ltd.
December 2002 - March 2003.
[Note: This site is now offline.]
The story
In 2001 I created a small temporary website for Access Summit, the 'Joint Universities Disability Resource Centre' for the 4 universities in Manchester, which was hosted on the DEMOS website. I was asked to build the permanent website but simply didn't have the time then.
In late 2002, my friend's company got the commission to build the new website and in December 2002 I started working for Nornir Ltd., mainly as an accessibility and standards consultant. I was initially asked to create the templates and stylesheets for the Access Summit site but also ended up building the information infrastructure and adding some of the content.
At the end of March 2003 the site was handed over - unfinished and with a few issues still unresolved - to the client who wanted to take control of the final stages of the development process.
Design and code
This is a support site for students with disabilities. Accessibility was of course priority. This fresh new site was a chance to apply everything I knew about accessibility and standard compliance from the start. The code is standard-compliant XHTML with good structural markup, and CSS for all presentational markup. The layout of content is done without tables, using CSS layout techniques. This is in accordance with the latest recommendations and guidelines for universal accessibility.
All code validates to its specified grammar, including the stylesheets (one of which is a print stylesheet) and the site also passes all 3 levels of the Bobby accessibility test and is therefore AAA compliant.
The look is a bit bland, although I added some nice little CSS effects. Don't forget that I only built the information structure and created templates in XHTML and several stylesheets. I expect that a graphics designer will add some sparkle to it.
This site is no longer online.
