You are viewing the new accessible, standards-compliant version of our site.
Normandale's recent website redesign is a big step for the college, bringing us more fully into compliance with the Section 508 Web Accessibility guidelines. The guidelines essentially require all electronic and information technology provided by Federal agencies to be useable by all people, disabled or otherwise.
We have tackled this challenge in several ways.
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XHTML and stylesheets.
Our site uses valid XHTML and CSS for all layout. Many other sites use HTML tables to lay out their pages with columns, rows, and boxes; ours uses simple tableless XHTML code, and our stylesheet provides all the visual layout. We only use tables when appropriate to present tabular data, such as in the Academic Calendar or the Information Request form.
The advantage is this approach is great. It's more cross-platform compatible, which means that our site looks good and works well in all major modern browsers (such as Camino, Internet Explorer 5/5.5/6, Mozilla, Netscape 6/7, Opera 5/6/7, etc.) on both Mac and Windows platforms. The site is also faster to browse and download, since the CSS file is downloaded once on the first page load and is cached (saved) by your browser for use on every page after that. Every subsequent page you visit only needs to download the XHTML, text, and any images for that page. All the other layout information has already been downloaded.
In addition to that the site is also functional and readable in everything from Netscape 4.x to Netscape 1.0 to a text-only browser like Lynx. Even wireless devices that don't recognize stylesheets can read our website's content, since our site's content doesn't have any embedded style markup that would break in such devices. In fact, visitors using an older browser or a text-only browser get an essentially text-only site.
To see how it works, open up http://www.normandale.edu/ in Netscape 4.x.
That's just the start. More explanation is on its way.
We hope you enjoy Normandale's new site.
