Northland Disabilities Resource Centre Mātāpuna Hauora
[August 2003] The Northland Disabilities Resource Centre Matapuna Hauora aims to empower people with disabilities by providing information and support enabling informed choices and decisions. Their website is a good step along that path, with excellent information about services, staff, publications, history and links.
The website also looks good, although Mac users may see a curious glitch beside the words "Welcome Haere Mai". Click a button in the top right of the window and you can listen to the waiata as an MP3. This opens in a separate window so you can close it any time if you've heard enough. The MP3 format is a good choice — many people these days have computers easily capable of playing it; the sound quality's great and the file size is small.
There's another button in the top right which invites you to visit the "text-only" version of the site. This is a bare bones site, that has had removed not only the pictures, but also much of the navigation and some of the content. In the past this technique has been used to make a site more accessible to those with disabilities — a fine goal for a Disabilities Resource Centre.
However, one of the main problems is ensuring that all visitors have access to the same information. Unfortunately this site has got out of step. For example, on the "full version" of the site, the Services page has 10 topics, while on the "text-only" version there are only seven. In addition, you must return to the home page to find links to the other pages.
A more modern approach would use stylesheets (and alternate text) to control the display of a single page, allowing the user access to all the information while reducing the load time of the page, the possibility of enlarging and reducing font sizes, whether or not graphics are displayed and so on.
Navigation could also be simplified by using Access Keys and Skip links. Together these would make it easier for a user who is restricted to the keyboard or who perhaps uses a device which might require four or five actions to move from each link to the next before activating one.
The use of frames for the "full" site is also a barrier to navigation as it prevents bookmarking and hides the address of the page you're on.
Those niggles aside though, there is plenty of information here. The Services section is particularly extensive and includes some useful (and beautiful) photos. The staff have a photo and a small write-up (though some photos are missing that crucial alternate text) and there is other information about the organisation: its trustees, history and so on.
If you want to contact the Centre you'll have no problem. There's an email link clearly available on every page and the Contact Us page offers a form which allows space for comments.
Finally, the Publications page makes several documents available as downloads — two on the full version of the site and three on the text-only version.
Summary: While this site could use a little tidying and some consistency checking it is very useful and informative. The photos are a real asset.
[www.drcnorthland.org.nz/]