Who is this “Ollie Parsley”??

Accessibility and Crappy Design

June 4th, 2008. Published under General. 2 Comments.

Sorry in advance for this rant. It is an insight into the what I think when I visit websites on the internet surfing travels. Only in the past year have I been increasing my awareness of accessibility. This was all due to the fact I was creating a spatial search tool for a local government website. Because it was a government website it had to be accessible. It needed to be WAI priority 2 level and learning about th requirements needed to acheive that level opened my eyes to accessibility.

But to be honest at that point I had never seen anyone use a screen reader and thought the number of people that could use it would be so small I wouldn’t bother with any other personal sites. But then last year I went to the Future of Web Apps…

It was at a talk by Robin Christopherson from AbilityNet that showed me how important accessibility is. Robin Is blind and stood up infront of almost a thousand people and ripped into websites like Amazon.com and Yahoo (with the lead developer of Yahoo in the audience!) and demonstrated the fact that he could not navigate round their sites and played what he hear in his screen reader through the speakers in the hall so we could all hear. Now that was truely eye opening! Please check them out at AbilityNet it really is interesting.

Right now onto what I think when I visit a website. I have a few things that I generally spot straight away and then look at in more detail and see exactly how they work and how simple things could improve their site.

1. Navigation and hovering
   Now when I visit a site and want to change page you obviously go straight to the navigation and put your cursor over a button or link etc. Now if you hover over the link and it makes the font change and add a shadow or a glow the chances are that it is a piece of JavaScript changing the image you are hovering over. If that happens I make sure it is an image by trying to select any text. This then makes me look for an alt tag. This is what is read by screen readers. If there is no alt tag or a title tag in the anchor then the site is rendered complete useless to a vision impaired user. The only page they can access is the homepage!
2. Flash
   In this section I am talking about whole flash sites or sites with flash navigation, not media like videos and audio etc. I remember back in the day when flash was all the rage. Even I wanted to learn it. You could do funky animations and add music to the background without having to attatch a crappy old wav file. But flash is the most inaccessible plugin out there. If the site does not have an HTML version of the site then they are immediatly discriminating (and I don’t use that word often) against users with vision impariments. Another thing that is bad is when a so-called web designer creates small flash buttons so that when the mouse hovers over you get a sound or a “cool” animation. It’s pointless as most of the time it could be done with a GIF and that image could easily have an alt or title tag that would make it accessible. An example of this is a site I came across while looking at random “developers” I have spoken to (plhomeimprovements.com). In this site you can clearly see that it could be quite easily achieved with HTML with server-side includes. It would be a simple job. But why do it in flash??? I really don’t understand! For me being a developer/designer it says one word to me amateur.
3. Simple things
   These are the few tiny problems that with literally minutes of time put into them could solve alot of problems:
   • Alt tags
   • Title tags
   • Unnescsary JavaScript (hovers that could be done with CSS etc)

So that is pretty much what I think when I go to a website. This is generally if the site is not in my eyes “popular”. For instance I wouldn’t got and look at the accessibility of digg.com. They get millions of visitors a month so are bound to have accessibility covered!

That’s my rant over with! Let me know if you have any thoughts on anything I have said. Even if it’s to disagree with me. I am always open to changing my mind.

Ollie