I chose to review the site Qwest.com, since I'm a customer and use their site often. Overall I thought the site was well designed and accessible, with the one major problem of no way to get past the authentication page without the ability to run javascript. Also all pages failed to passed CSS or HTML stict validation... maybe it wasn't such a hot site after all.
First, I thought the design was quite nice. They've made
some recent improvements to the site and everything flows
very well.
I did not appreciate having to hack my way through all
the insite advertisement to get some general information.
I understand their a business but by the time I got to a
tech support page for a modem I was ready to punch
something.
Second, I thought the color scheme was nice because it was full of soft colors that mixed well, with the one issue of having so many different colors at times, it was almost as if they tried to see how many could be on the page and still look good. Some pages failed that particular test.
Again it's definitely worth mentioning that without the ability to run javascript, your pretty much locked out of the site. They could improve this by allowing users to get deeper into the site without javascript.
Also, this may be a problem with all large companies, but sometimes the sheer number of links on the page at any one time caused alot of confusion. This could perhaps be fixed by using better developed drop down menus.
I did appreciate that the site was done all with CSS and they avoided tables in every situation possible I thought. Their downside was the CSS did not validate and could use some cleaning up. I was able to still view all content in an organized manner when I disabled CSS.
They claimed to be HTML Strict but they failed to pass the validation test. However when I loaded the page it looked very clean with only two warnings, but the validation tool pulled up 8 errors as well. Ironically, most of the errors were related to javascript as far as I could tell. Layout though was handled primarily through the CSS, which was nice to see.
The site was really quite accessible. Although the javascript kept coming back to haunt me. That was really the only issue I found with accessibility. So they need to have a way to disable javascript and still have the page be accessible. Yeah that was all I could find possible wrong with the accessibility.
Source:http://www.qwest.com