Slashdot Mirror

It's not as easy as it sounds. A certain Texas university recently upgraded their homepage in a similar manner. There is no attempt at being accesible, despite pleas from both students and faculty. In this case, marketing took the front seat to common sense.

With that in mind, I would like to recommend Bobby. Bobby is a program that will scour a webpage and point out where there are flaws with its accesibility. You can find it at http://www.cast.org/bobby/.

For example, Slashdot does not receive a Bobby approved rating, meaning that it could improve its accesibility.

To find out more about making your web site accessible for the disabled, here's two useful links.

Bobby - This web site scans web pages to see if it may pose a problem for the disabled.

Viewable With Any Browser - This site is running a campaign to make the Web a useful communication medium by making it accessible to as many different browsers as possible. This may appeal to Slashdotters. It would by implication vehemently oppose proprietary extensions to HTML, such as those perpetrated by Microsoft and Netscape, which must be a Good Thing.

It is important to remember that the blind are a part of our community, and would like to participate as equals as much as possible. Although they can't actually see images and other graphic coolness on web sites, they have access to voice synthesizers and similar technology that renders web pages and other computer-based information in a form that they can use. That's why ALT tags are important.

(I attended a 21st birthday party once where there were two blind people in attendance. The slam dancing was interesting. Apparently the blind attendees enjoyed it immensely.)
--

Bobby is at http://www.cast.org/bobby/

According to Bobby, the slashdot page is missing one ALT attribute on one IMG tag. Here's a link to the Bobby analysis of slashdot.

For comparison, here's the same type of analysis for cnn.com.

--Kynn

Bobby is at http://www.cast.org/bobby/

According to Bobby, the slashdot page is missing one ALT attribute on one IMG tag. Here's a link to the Bobby analysis of slashdot.

For comparison, here's the same type of analysis for cnn.com.

--Kynn

Bobby is at http://www.cast.org/bobby/

According to Bobby, the slashdot page is missing one ALT attribute on one IMG tag. Here's a link to the Bobby analysis of slashdot.

For comparison, here's the same type of analysis for cnn.com.

--Kynn

JAWS reads the screen, and by using the number pad and function keys, provides a pop-up list of the links in a page, and opens a new window if needed for framed content. It has a little trouble with text that's near sub-tables -- it'll read left-hand navbar links with the text -- but on the whole, it does a good job on the Web. It uses a modified version of Internet Explorer -- not Lynx. Too bad it doesn't do Netscape. Too bad we don't have a little free time so I can teach her HTML, too.

It does a prety damn good job in the rest of Windows, too. Using keyboard shortcuts, I've gotten her to the point of doing most of her work and email by herself, not using a mouse at all. That's doing Word, Excel if she needs to, Access, and in a very limited way (the sofware's just now supporting it), Powerpoint. She's as good under Windows as most of the sighted folks in here, even better than some.

I personally thought, CMIIW (correct me if I'm wrong), that anyone with connectivity should be able use the Web. It's all out there for general use. Sure, you can have shocked sites, but it's not too hard to provide a text-only, non-shocked, or reduced graphics site for those who can't see them. It's the same principle as testing under multiple browsers on multiple platforms. And it's not too hard to make sure fairly complicated HTML is easily accessible -- you can use Bobby to check it out.

Personally, I like nyc because there are still a million places that a person on crutches (let alone a wheelchair) couldn't access. There needs to be some crazy whacked out sites like whatever hell.com or something (kind of preposterous in the first place). But if a group is preposterous enough to call themselves america online (Hey I had an account back when the fam had geoworks ensemble), they should try to at least be somewhat compatible with some of the accessibility standards.

"This page does not yet meet the requirements for Bobby Approved status." is what bobby says about www.aol.com. Sure, not that many sites are (including the venerable /. in full-on mode, but I bet the stripped version passes (check your user config)), but the major service providers should at least think about making their sites accessible to all.

Of course this goes against free enterprise or something, but hey this is the good ol' U. S. of A. goshdarnit. Let the people complain.

I know my homepage rocks in w3-mode, and hence emacspeak, but I don't think a single blind person has ever checked it out.

Oh yeah, check out www.ssdp.org, the times they are a changin'.

When writing pages, the author does NOT control the final image, the customers client does that. As web page editors, we can only suggest the presentation elements.

When I teach courses on HTML, I pound on about HTML validators, such as http://validator.w3.org/ for correct (ie valid) HTML, and http://www.cast.org/bobby/ for accessibility issues (such as EM instead of I)

In my opinion, no WYSIWYG editor produces HTML that is valid for both HTML level 4 and accessibility!

By all means, use these tools, but be aware of the issues that they raise, and learn the coding so that you can correct their mistakes.

Also, run the pages by CAST Bobby.

It will scan for common accessability problems, point them out, suggest fixes, and give an overall score. Very helpful.