Winston Wächter Fine Art believes that the web should be easy to navigate for all users, regardless of ability. To that end, our site has undergone a round of improvements to make it more accessible for people with a diverse range of hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive ability.
Here are the highlights of what we’ve done:
Global Header
- Simplified code structure and made the header more semantically clear
- Made main navigation area easier to navigate for users of keyboards and screen readers by removing hidden dropdown at mobile sizes and adding clear focus states
- Added “skip link” for keyboard users, allowing them to jump directly to main content
Global Footer
- Restructured code, adding more semantic information
- Added aria-labels and visually hidden helper text to make for clearer, simpler screen-reader navigation
- Overhauled our newsletter subscription form to make it effortlessly navigable by keyboard users (our thanks to Greg Kraus)
Front Page
- Revised document outline for ease of navigation
- Added aria labels to banner navigation, clarifying the main actions for screen readers
Artists and Exhibitions pages
- Rewrote page document outlines for better, clearer, easier-to-navigate structure
- Created new, simpler, more reader-friendly “tile” components, styled for maximum affordance
- Added focus states for each artist or exhibition tile
- Added aria labels to each artist, so that some screen readers will hear names listed first-to-last, rather than last-to-first. (This is a debatable use of aria labels, but we feel it makes the artist listings easier to understand than the way they’re presented to the sighted.)
- Removed potentially confusing alternative text from images on this page. (We believe the images serve a more decorative purpose in this particular context.)
- Clarified and simplified for screen readers the event information for current and upcoming exhibitions
Individual Artist and Exhibition pages
- Implemented Modaal accessible lightboxes for all collection images
- Rewrote markup with clean document outlines and some aria helpers for maximum clarity
- Added clearer focus states
- On individual Artist pages, cleaned up default video embed code to improve accessibility, and improved internal page navigation to preserve keyboard focus while navigating
Gallery page
- Implemented Modaal accessible lightboxes for all images of the gallery and installations
- Clarified markup for location hours and address
Individual images
The gallery is still undergoing a systematic examination of all images to ensure that each has appropriate alternative text and captions.