American Philharmonic Site, Equipment Testing
Summary of Test Results
Website homepage looked good at two resolutions in six browsers on six different platforms. Load time good on dial-up modem, excellent with cable. Some of the two-column pages degrade in IE6, but still seem acceptable. Site tested at Disabilities Resource Center, everything looked good to the staff specialist (text on one link modified).
Resolution/Operating System/Browser Testing
Using a free 24-hour subscription to BrowserCam (www.browsercam.com), I was able to test the homepage at two resolutions in six different browsers (with different versions of some of the browsers) on six different platforms. The 800x600 resolution screenshots narrowed the page to the navigation and central content, but were otherwise indistinguishable from the 1024x768 resolution in all browsers on all platforms. The home page looked good in all the browsers on all the platforms; there were 89 screen-shots in all. Browsers and platforms are listed below.
In IE6, some of the two-column pages show the right-hand column starting below the left-hand column; in my opinion, the degradation did not disrupt the readability or aethetics of the page.
The Browsers
- Explorer 6.0
- Explorer 7.0
- Explorer 8.0
- Firefox 2.0.0.20
- Firefox 3.0.8
- Safari 1.3
- Safari 2.0
- Safari 3.2.1
- Netscape 9.0.0.3
- Opera 9.62
- Chrome 1.0.154.36
The Platforms
- Macintosh OSX 10.3
- Macintosh OSX 10.4
- Macintosh OSX 10.5
- Windows 2000 Professional
- Windows XP
- Windows Vista
Load Time
The load time on a setup with a modem connection was reported to be a couple of seconds, which the user said was good. On cable, the load time is pretty much instanteous.
Screen Size and Color Depth
Pages look best on a MAC with 17" screen or larger, but they look fine on PC's with screen sizes 15" and below.
508 Compliance
Our thanks to Kathy Burton of the SRJC Diability Resources Department for her assistance with the 508 testing.
Kathy was pleased that all our pages have headers, as that's important to navigating a page with a screen reader. Our forms worked fine. Kathy suggested we change the "click here" button on the support page to better describe the link, so I have changed the text to "membership". We were able to read AP's membership form PDF file with the screen reader. We were also able to read AP's CuteNews articles on the Plaudits page.
Links
Links are all working.
Problems Discovered and Resolved
Problem with "larger" and "largest" text sizes in IE discovered in testing was fixed. Two disfunctional links found in testing and fixed.