[Emil]

Ben,

Thank you for spending the time to evaluate our website.

You make some good points, especially with the accessibility summary. We designed our website with some accessibility criteria in mind such as alt tags for images, XHTML standards compliance so accessibility parsers can actually understand the website, and a few other things. We will look into possibly rearranging the XHTML so that the content shows first.

As for tables verses css, there is a lot of debate around that. The reason we use tables is because

(1) we have very specific sizing requires for our website (a minimum width, a maximum width, some columns are fixed width while others are variable width, etc) which might actually be harder to implement with css so that all browsers (mainly IE6, IE7, and firefox) behave the same way.

(2) We have a lot of people working on the website and most of the new students are just learning how to write XHTML and it will be a while until they also understand CSS.

We appreciate your feedback and we will definitely make some changes based on it.