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Corporate Websites and the Lack of Accessibility
"Since I work for the company, I have complained about this problem to the powers that be, and they have replied that they do not believe that this is that big of a problem. How many blind people could be using the site anyway? Well, although I'm not blind, I feel for them. Discriminating against them like this is like discriminating against any other minority.
As absurd as it sounds, if there were a page that required you to validate what race or gender you were before you could visit the site, and denied access to certain groups, there would be huge moral outrage at this. This is essentially what is going on here.
I have seen it happen again and again with smaller companies' Web sites, but there can be some excuse there. For example, smaller companies may not be aware of the full implications of doing things this way, or have the money to support it properly.
But when it is a major pharmaceutical like this, the largest in the world, in fact, there ceases to be an excuse of any sort. Really, there is little effort to making a site blind enabled, and in fact most are. Ironically, it is those sites on which the most money was probably spent, that are usually not the ones that can be accessed by the blind.
I think that it is time, as morally responsible individuals, that we make it known to these corporate beasts that we will not tolerate discrimination like this.
We have a responsibility, as conscious-wielding individuals to make our technologies reach out to each and every person, just as those technologies reached out to us."
ppl may be interested in http://www.useit.com Jakob Nielson makes several similar points in his alertbox pages. You may also be interested in http://www.alistapart.com for several interesting pieces on how it will soon be illegal in the states to have a web site that descriminates against the disabled, the site uses frames so definate links are hard but the main story of interest is "the clock is ticking" and it's follow ups. sparkes
*** www.linuxuk.co.uk relaunches 1 Mar 2000 ***
blog and junk
This sort of thing might hit a bit closer to home for those of you who, like me, have wrist problems that may make mouse and keyboard more and more painful to use. The latest dragon speech recognition software allows you to simply "speak" a link to click on it (of course you have to be using IE...) But as more sites move from text to images for navigation... you see the problem.
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.
... make your opinions known!
... ;-)
(It is a horrible site, not only because it discriminates against the visually impaired, but also because it uses Java and image-navigation which make it difficult to be viewed by folks with older computers, slow connections, etc.)
If this company will not listen to their employees, they may pay attention to outside opinions. Of course, if we could convince them that they are losing potential clients, that would be the most effective strategy, though I am not sure how many of us here could cconvince them of that
Has anyone notified some of the associations involved in rights for the blind (National Federation of the Blind)? Certainly, the Aventis site will not be Bobby approved!
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
There are other reasons why ALT tags are a good idea.
One major one is that the net is sometimes slow. Even with the very fat pipes I use at work, there are times when I click navigation buttons before the graphics appear. Without ALT tags, that isn't a reasonable alternative.
Corporate sites tend to concentrate entirely on glitz. Many of them are stuck in a TV commercial mode.
I expect that to go away within the next five years, as the glamour of the web fades and Dot Com ceases to sound cool.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Now we're being overrun with britney spears, jocks, preppies, football and all the other stupid pop culture crap that the techies came here to avoid. I'm all for starting a whole new frontier to get away from all these people. Anyone else?
New merger today.
And what Url?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
- Lot of webmasters target web site to specific system: they are optimized for IE or Netscape, for a specific screen size making them unusable on smaller screen
- They also requires Javascript, which despite the fact that it is available only in Netscape or IE, make also webas dangerous as walking on mines (see recente CERT advisory)
- Does not even consider respecting HTML. This is also software vendor fault as the make pseudo-WYSIWYG page generator that generates HTML that does not pass thru the W3C validator.
- Some of them even require proprietary technology like Flash.
I really miss the time were browsing was doable with NCSA Mosaic.Hub
This article seems rather timely to me; I took a few minutes last night/this morning to bring my personal web page "up to code" as they say. It's not hard to do at all.
I found a cool automated website checker that looks for things that will hinder a site's accessibility. Go to www.cast.org/bobby and run your site through it. If you've written valid HTML 4.0, you won't have much work to do. If not.... heh.
Tetris rules.
Pretty==good. (functional == too much work)
I did/do some consulting for a company. They had a couple of people doing the company web server.
They made new internal web page that was hide the information, eg move mouse over colored dot to find out what dot did. I told them that it was not a good interface, and their response was hit the go to old site button.
In another incident, a person was looking up a resume, and got back too many poor responses. I said walk down the hallway and tell the web database designer what you want to find. If he can't do it then he needs to redesign the front-end. They said it was not possible.
They ignore the input, and don't knwo what thier audience wants. And these web designers left for new jobs that paid 80 and 120k.
For one of my clinets wants a spinning logo, just like another site. That's number one on the client list. He has not given me half of the content for pages to complete the site, but wants a rotating logo.
Not to mention those of us who don't load images. The recent poll here says that even being the geeks that we are, a good chunk are still using modems. Probably a lot don't load images by default.
If you need a good argument for the corporate-types for sites without a lot of useless images, try talking about search engines. Want your corporate site found? Do you think search engines run every image they find throught OCR? No, they need text. No text=no search hits.
Greg
To making accessible web-sites?
Personally, I love Phil Greenspun's style (photo.net).
Dunno if it IS an accessible web-site, but his style is CLEAN.
..And the military, who first put this stuff together. You techies are just second generation unix shell users who settled here and pushed the creators of the net off to MIL-net.
So don't be whining when someone else comes and settles with ya.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
That is part of the problem.
The market for web-clued people is so skewed that some companies will hire anyone they can find, and not all of them have clue.
That's why there's Java-abuse, Javascript abuse, lack of alt-tags, and lots of other dumb-assed problems with web sites all over. A PHB could easily hire a guy to make a web page that would look very nice and useful, compared to a Geocities homepage.
But, eventually, Clue will sink in. (Please Lord... I'll be good...)
On the anecdote side: the alt tag for the "Department of Justice" icon spelled "Department" initially. After a few weeks I got off my lame keester and emailed Rob about it. He fixed it within hours.
Wasnt there some noise on AOL and their page with much about the same thing?
I didn't do this, now did I?
-- Oh Well
I've never really thought of accesibility on the internet till now, I had thought that for the most part it was pretty disability neutral but now I realize that its not true. That this isn't true is a failure on the part of the web site designers.
A web site should be all about exchanging information just like an advertising brochure should be. Sure, the information is obviously biased but the goal is to feed that information to the holder of the brochure. The best brochures I've seen, such as some of the better car brochures, have layers of information. There are usually attractive graphics and with each graphic there is at least a bullet of text describing what you see. You could argue that its redundant, if you can't see the luxurious leather interior you're probably not going to buy a car, but its still there. The text is carefully crafted and you could read the brochure without looking at the pictures and get an idea of what the manufacturer is trying to get across. I've seen early mock ups of these brochures with crude sketches in place of the real eye candy and it is true.
Many web designers are guilty of propogating the eye candy without disemminating any information. They're more concerned with the overall look of the site (ooh, pretty buttons with dazzling roll overs that light up when you click!) than providing any content. It's like a 30 second prime time commercial for beer rather than an actual advertisement. If you're with the 90% of the population who is sighted, runs Internet Explorer and uses Windows you're fine. Pick any random change in variable from here and you don't get any message at all.
So not only are they making things hard for users with vision problems, users with alternate operating systems or browsers, but they're actually violating what should be the basic tenet of advertising: get the message out.
I'm not saying get rid of the eye candy, I like it personally. Just make sure that anybody and everybody can read your clients message.
Couple months ago AOL was sued under the Americans with Disabilities act. I'd find that case, point the corprate lawyers to it and let them at it. BTW, keep notes so you can prive you warned the lawyers - if they ignore you and the company is sued you are holding a smoking gun. You can then show the lawyers were negligant, and anything to get the lawyers is good. And if they fight the battle like to keep the company legal, so much the better. Anyone else see the irony of a medical website that is not accessable? The elderly after all are the ones who need drugs the most, and the elderly typically have worse eyesite then younger people.
First I start getting 'internal server errors' and it looks like all the replies to this article that have links in them got the < /a>'s eaten.
-- Dr. E --
because web pages load in just a few seconds when there are no graphics but I stopped doing that because too many sites were using frames with no alt tags on their graphic links or worse, server side image maps, which provide no information to the client whatsoever. I would go to some sites with lynx and see nothing.
When I write a webpage every graphic has an alt tag, I use tables, not frames, I never use image maps. I always browse the page with several different browsers to make sure that the page is equally viewable whether it is text or graphics. Oh, and I use a few optimized jpg's for my very sparce graphics.
I hate sights that say "best when viewed with ___ browser" Because I know that most of these sites are going to look like a graphics design artist threw up all over the screen. Let the font fest begin!
Please people, remember that fonts are graphics too. Please don't send me a picture of text. I get annoyed when I am sent twenty buttons with text embedded in the buttons. A menu like the one that slashdot has in the upper left side of the page is great. Please, don't change this!
And how about those sights where all the fonts are jammed together. Aren't those sites just lovely. Web designers need to stop trying to control the placement of every letter on the screen and just let the text flow where it will. Concentrate on the overall view, let the idividual web browsers worry about the exact placement of text.
I just wonder if XML is going to help or hurt the cause of putting more info in the tags?
-- Never make a general statement.
Hello,
:-)
There is a very simple solution to the problems of handicap access, multi-nationalization, national language support, alternative displays, etc. Its over fifteen years old too.
Do it the way Apple does with resource forks to files or the way its done in the Microsoft & Unix world (when its done at all) with resource files.
Instead we have literals hard-coded right into the delivery medium (web pages, applets, ASPs, PERL and Java scripts,) which means that the medium is a bitch to retrofit and always suffer from a lack of understanding of any disabilities the programmer doesn't have.
(Also from other QA problems like testing for input that overflows buffers, is inconsistent or plain incorrect because the person that programs things always tests to make things work instead of make things break. That's why they think they hate QA
If you have to start off right with resource forks or files and don't have the opportunity to screw up the literal handling right from the beginning, that kind of thing can be addressed after the programmers have got the delivery mechanisms working properly.
But we have got to get literals out of the programmer's hands.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
-- Oh Well
The problems occur after punching and destroying the SCO media with your fists because of the gay licensing bullshit.
Solution: use a hammer or high explosive.
A friend recently asked me to visit the URL for her new company and comment on how cool the page was.
Totally Shockwave dependent. No text navigation, no image navigation, no "navigation" at all if you don't have the plug-in.
"Well, it's really cool. Our web developer is really proud of it. Can't you just get the plug-in?"
That's not really the point, it it? YOUR company is trying to sell something TO ME. Why should I have to go through a hassle just to view what amounts to a sales brochure?
Don't even get me started on someone who can't/won't provide a "dumb-browser" alternative calling himself a "web developer". Grrr....
What's really funny about this (to me, at least) is that the cutting-edge, latest-stuff web companies tend to be the WORST offenders. In their haste to prove they know stuff and have all sorts of flash (pun intended) they leave out all those boring INFORMATIVE parts.
-- In the future, everyone will code Perl for 15 minutes. --
What I don't understand is the comment at the start of the story about "no longer just for techies". Traditionally, "we techies" have been unable to write coherently let alone presentably, and yet ... look who's come up with SGML and the <a href="http://www.w3.org/DOM/">DOM</a>!
3 m/eng/">w3m</a>, of course, but anything the future will throw at us in the way of browsers for the blind / otherwise-impaired, as well. That means ALT modifiers in your IMG tags, or else, amongst other things, and probably stopping the reliance on graphical fuzz.
(Compare and contrast the way that on Usenet, it's "us die-hard hackers" who are "insistent" on compliance with Usenet formatting (plaintext or die, roughly) and yet the non-geeks who persist in posting in HTML and MIME and everything.)
Me, I think web sites should be designed with accessibility in *all* browsers in mind - not just <a href="http://lynx.browser.org/">lynx</a> and <a href="http://ei5nazha.yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp/~aito/w
I wonder what'd happen if we had linguists designing websites instead of "graphic artists"...
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
On 5 May 1999 the W3C issued a recommendation (i.e. an official specification on par with HTML and other standards) for web content accessibility guidelines, containing different tiers of potential conformance:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT
If you really want to get their attention on accessibility,
show them what their site looks like on the web-browsing cell phones that all the stock traders carry.
micco
There are some excelent resources available for those who wish to incorporate accessibility into their web design.
The Trace Research And Development Center has a set of guidelines for designers of all types, including web-designers and software developers.
The WWW Consortium (www.w3c.org) has a set of guidelines as well.
I know my workplace's Web site (I am a QA analyst) is not accessible and pretty under LYNX. That means it is not accessible to blind people or simple Web browsers.
/. and CNET links to them). They just don't care! I would like to know what's the percentage of commercial real estate people who are blind and use the Internet? Are there sources to find this type of information? I'd like to know what type of job roles that disabled people have when using the Internet. Maybe this information would convince the management to think about this issue.
:)
What sucks is that I tried to tell the management about this issue (I even sent this
I also have physical disabilities and partially deaf. It can be frustrating not being to access Web sites. I can feel their pain.
I even tried to do my best to make my personal Web site (The Ant Farm) friendly to LYNX. It is NOT easy!
Thank you in advance for replies.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
And second, we just simply forget about people who have older browsers or are otherwise lacking in their ability to view all the bells and whistles. For people who develop web sites and preview them on IE5 through our DSL lines, we're just not going to remember about things like alt tags or dealing with people who don't support frames. I have no idea how my web site looks for people who are viewing it through Netscape 2. I deleted it from my hard drive years ago.
So what will save us? I think it's the next generation of browsers -- not IE or Netscape, but the little browsers you're going to have on your handhelds and cell phones. Ones that don't support Flash or Java or, heck, MouseOver events. As companies start bulding sites for these smaller browsers, they're going to remember, "Hey! That's right! I should add alt tags to my images!" That attitude will eventually carry over to their "real" sites.
That is, until IE8 for the PalmPilot comes around. :-)
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
How many websites (corporate or otherwise) still have a complete "text-only" version of their site? I don't really see that too much anymore. I understand it's a lot of work to duplicate the whole site, but I seem to recall back in the old days (about 1995 or so) when the web was really starting to get popular with the general public, it seemed normal for websites to have the "text-only version" link right on the home page. Maybe that's just because back then there were more people using text browsers than there are now. Any web designers out there still doing this for their clients? Just curious.
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"It was people! People soiled our green!"
*Sigh*
I know just the type of site you are describing. Always makes me shudder. (OT, but speaking of shuddering, has anyone seen the site for "Fight Club"? )
Unfortunately, a lot of people do seem very impressed with the fancy Shockwave/Java stuff available that won't work for all users. We've had clients who couldn't understand why we'd want to include HTML-only versions of the pages for users who couldn't (or didn't want to) access the Shockwave pages. Some of them even said that it was a "waste of time and money", or that we didn't want to cater to people who wouldn't upgrade their software(!!!). Perhaps it is a form of "browser-snobbery", or maybe just ignorance. (Or possibly they've seen too many of those "cutting-edge" web developer sites!)
It can be difficult to argue with some of the more stubborn clients, and I am guessing that some web developers don't make the effort to stand up to them.
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
Using a touch screen will slow down your typing, but it will give your wrists a break, since you have to use different muscles to touch the screen. The only problem is you lose the fine resolution of a mouse.
I found that using the IBM trackpoint helps. It may reduce the pain a little, which may not be a good thing as lets you work longer. The best thing for an RSI is rest and treatment.
Another reason for text based navigation, loading images take too much time for us speed addicts when stuck on a 28.8k modem.
Fight Spammers!
I always go by the following rules when designing a site. Of course it sometimes depends on who you are developing for and the function of the site but these are my basic guidlines.
- Always include the ALT HEIGHT and WIDTH tags for images.
- Never use javascript for navigation of the site or its functionalitly.
- Try not to use frames.
- Unless absolutly nessiscary do not make your pages bigger than 40k.
- Do not assume that your visitors have their monitors set to 640x480 or 1600x1200 or
... Too many sites are designed for the monitor size that it is being developed on. - ....
The 2 reasons for doing the previous things are for faster load times and accessability. The list could go on forever but these are the important ones. Please reply and add if I have missed any.I wish slashdot had a speell checker
Exactly! When I am at home with a 26400 modem connection (56K modem with crappy phone lines -- no DSL and cable modem service in my home area, and can't afford T1s!), I usually surf the Web without images 95% of my session. I can live without the graphics. If I need them, I will hit the image buttons to load them! For other stuff, like reading newsgroups, I use tin (text-based). I don't need GUI =).
What bugs me the most is that Netscape Communicator has a nasty bug where it will leak memory due to poor rendering with a lot of tables. Usually, this doesn't happen if I auto-load graphics. Anyone noticed this? I noticed this on a few computers I use.
Who else surf without graphics most of the times?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I agree that Corp sites are often too complex and flashy to the point where they become usless to inet novices as well.
When I used to do some small sites for some little businesses back home I always used what I call the "Mom Factor". I always had my mom test it (an internet novice to the extreme). If my mom could use it, it was good, if she had trouble, I needed to do some more work. It kept the sites functional.
Not to change the subject, but I think that the accessibility issue is really a special case of a larger web design narcissism issue.
Too many people are convinced that they can create a kick-ass web site all on their own and then go on to make fetid piles of stinking net-garbage. I know this from personal experience having stunk up the Internet with several crappy web sites of my own.
Very few people have the total package of skills that it takes to make a very ambitious web site successful. A website that accomplishes many things or has complex operational requirements is going to be an interdisciplinary effort requiring marketing skills (to determine what people want to do), software UI design skills (to determine how to make the dynamic behavior of the site comprehensible and to address access issues), graphic arts (to create a functional design program), writing and editing, database and system administration etc.
Of course, real world web sites aren't built with all of these skills. The best can finesse the issue (e.g. slashdot is really ugly from a design standpoint but works pretty from a UI standpoint. The content provided by paid Andover staff is OK but not brilliant, but the interaction of the respondents is what matters). The worst sites are testaments to hubris of marketing people who think they are graphic artists, or graphic artists who think they are UI experts.
I'm gradually learning on websites that I create; slowly, they're getting simpler and less ambitious in areas that I'm not good at (e.g. graphic design), and better in areas I am good at (programming).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There's nothing worse than having to wait through a silly twenty second Flash animation just to get to the actual information I am looking for on a corporate web site. Is it too much to ask for a "skip animation" option? But I guess that would work against the whole "image" the company is trying to get across by creating the animation in the first place.
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"It was people! People soiled our green!"
I am hearing a lot of complaints that making a web site accessible is not easy. IMVHO that is a total cop out. If you use strict HTML 4.0 and CSS 1.0 you will find that your sites:
CSS is really the ultimate solution to all of this, as it seperates layout and display from content, which is the way it really should be. w3.org highly pushes the use of CSS because of this. (CSS has different media types, so in theory a text or voice browser could request a different style sheet then the one you are going to pass to 4.x or 5.x visual browsers)
Go thee now to w3.org and read the w3 web accessibility guidelines. They aren't that hard, and if you take them into consideration from the start, you will find that making web pages takes way less time. And if nothing else AT LEAST go and get HTML Tidy and let it mangle your HTML back into something that is near standards compliant. If people at least used it, the web would be significantly more multi-browser friendly than it is now. (Note: HTML tidy currently picks up 364 errors/warnings on the slashdot front page.)
P.S. To add a bit of flamebait here, any thoughts about a CSS version of slashdot, as it would be nice to get out of the nested table jail.
There is no silver bullet. Plus, werewolves make better neighbors than zombies or vampires anyway.
You bring up a very good issue, one which I have been involved before. Accessibility is very overlooked. I do contracting for a government agency, and by law they cannot do business with my company if we are not ADA compliant. From what I have seen, this isn't enforced 100%, but it is a powerful tool to pursuade organizations to get their act together.
If your company has any contracts with the government at all, they should get compliant immediately. I looked for the article and evidence for this, but couldn't relocate it. If you can't find info on it, contact me directly and I'll help you.
On a side note, I would encourage any organization to not use html tools like Frontpage or Hotmetal Pro. Both of these tools populate the ALT tag with frivolous data, simply telling the image name and dimensions. The only things worse than failing compliance is to obfuscate the meaning of the page and make a blind person to listen to enumerable image names.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
corporate pants suffer from a lack of access as well, as it is sometimes difficult to pour bowls of hot grits down the pants of their ceos. thank you.
Recently I have been working with XML and XSL to see how the relavent content of any site can be presented to a hetergenous group of browsers. For the technical stuff check out Apache's website and in particular their XML stuff. A friend of mine is nearly blind so he and I spend quite a good deal of time talking about issues surrounding accessibility and what new technologies can do to enable him to take advantage of the internet. Often he and I share the same frustration of visiting a web site and being assaulted by all of these graphical images, fixed size small fonts, and general clutter. Sometimes it is a real pain to search through data to find what we are interested in. I think if sites can start using XML and XSL a lot of these problems could be solved. XML allows a content developer to tag the data they are presenting for what content it represents (i.e. on a music site with a track list from an album you might see tags for artist name, album title, track title, etc). XSL allows these site developers to specify how to present that data to the end viewer's particular browser. So you could make a style sheet for MSIE/Netscape, lynx, WAP, an audio browser, a palm pilot, etc. I have already requested that my webmaster install support for XML so that I can redo my pages to be more friendly for text based browsers, audio browsers, PDA based browsers, etc.
A simple thing, aside from websites, is unified messaging. I have been using JFax just as a place to get voice mail and faxes, since I don't have a home telephone number. You can also use JFAX to get and send your e-mail from any account that is POP-3 accessible. For my friend, this might be the easiest way to communicate via the internet. And yes that JFax link I provided is for the affiliate program so that I get a commission if you sign up.
Given that companies are trying to make their websites as accessible as possible in the hopes of being able to sell more and more products, I don't think we have much to worry about in terms of the future. Just think about what has happened with WAP in the last year or so. Certainly on a small cell phone screen one cannot use the images and annoying fonts that are used in a graphical browser. I think the future is looking bright for all those who suffer some form of visual impairment. Think of how much harder it would be for them to interact with the rest of the world, if there were no internet.
Stuart Eichert
Stuart Eichert
--Dave
Several fallicies here. First, there is the implicit assumption that there are no blind techies - which seems potentially very offensive. Second, that techies use a graphics-enabled browser. Also there is an assumption that techies would be interested in the corporate propaganda that this pharmacutical conglomerate wants to spew. It seems what they really don't realize is that Internet is not limited to ignorant mass-market consumers with full eyesight .
--
http://gammatron.weblogger.com
and for more reasons than just accesibility. Using lots of images, flash, javascript, etc . . . does nothing but slow down pages and make them a pain in the ass to view for people without IE 5/Netscape 4. Take a look at Jakob Nielsen's site for lots of info on web usability in general.
On my own personal site, I use primarily static HTML with some frames. All of my navigational/title graphics have alt tags, and I refuse to use platform specific plugins like flash. I also preview each new page at 640x480 in both IE & navigator on win and linux before I post them to make sure everything is readable. While this layout may not be very flashy or modern (layout has not changed drastically since I started the site in 95), it is functional and fast.
As a counter example, I recently helped my sister (a graphic design major) put a site on line. She used dreamweaver to build her site. Dreamweaver created the entire site in images and flash! Even the text was created as images! Unbelievably slow and inefficient.
-JeremyH
I have developed several web sites for government clients and accessibility is a big issue for them. I am not aware of any current regulation or directive but it is definitely on it's way for Government sites. And if they have to do it, you can bet that commercial sites will have to make "reasonable accommodation" under the a new attachment to the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Attitudes like those exhibited by this company are a guarantee of regulation. We solved it by implementing new coding standards that required ALT tags, set new templates with the graphic designers, and made a Bobby scan part of the QA process. Not every one is going to be this structured in their approach but to deny the problem will bring pain for us all. So go to CAST and get going.
We solved it by implimenting new coding standards that required ALT tags, set new templates with the graphic designers, and made a Bobby scan part of the QA process. Not every one is going to be this structured in thier approach but to deny the problem will bring pain for us all.Slashdotizens,
I propose that a single day be dedicated to TROLLING of all kinds. That way, the efforts of all TROLLS can be concentrated into one horrifying day, every week. Let's make it every TUESDAY, so there is time to rally the TROLLS.
TollTroll
I think the main reason for this is that most web designers are focused on layout and not the other parts, the "boring" stuff.
In bigger web site developments, the work is often divided into "design" (as in layout and overall graphics) and actual "coding" (as in splitting images up, reducing image sizes, and most important, implementing everything in HTML), and done by different persons.
But everything starts with the site design and a good HTML coder can not always compensate for a bad design, from the accessability viewpoint, at the beginning. If the project manager, the customer and the designer have agreed on "we want a site in Flash", you may have a tough job explaining to them why you should implement an alternative design for those without Flash or even without graphics at all. The customer is often a non-techie, and won't even understand the problem at all, the designer won't be your friend if you critisize his flashy layout and point out accessability errors, and will always argue "Why won't everybody run IE 5.0? In a matter of months, everybody will, and should, and our problem is solved", and finally, your boss will argue that it's a minor problem (that what the customer does not care about or is not interested in will always be a minor problem) and that you have a deadline.
So it's not that easy to convince people. These arguments are far too common.
But personally, I'm convinced that it's really simple to do a good site design, given that you have it in mind from the very start of the designing process. As many slashdotters know, a simple tool as lynx is often good enough to measure accessabilty. To make a site viewable in lynx, you should:
- Avoid frames. If you don't, you should make sure that you provide means for easy navigation. Also, of course, make sure that no information gets lost in the no-frames version and that it's always up-to-date with the frames version. This of course speaks for some kind of database solution. But you can avoid this problem completely by avoiding frames. Granted, most bigger sites today have to use frames, but they also often use databases for storage of content, so it should be no problem.
- Apply ALT= attributes. Everybody reading this on Slashdot should know that by now. However, don't do it on every darn image, but where it has to be. By that I mean that spacer images should preferably have ALT="", so that they don't mess up the readability in lynx, but all other images that contain some sort of information in text should have. And use some sense when you set the ALT= attributes. Some bad examples are "company logo" and "horisontal ruler", use "Company, Inc." and "" instead, ie. use someting that makes sense in a text-only browser, and avoid the graphical information that really isn't needed in those.
- If you use style sheets, beware that browsers render the paragraph tags differently. If you put something in a "block" (DIV or P), Netscape will automatically put a paragraph before the next block, although it really isn't there in the HTML, and thereby maybe fool you not to use paragraphs were they really should have been.
There is probably more, but I can't come up with more right now.Browsers that don't render CSS of course don't do this, so make sure you use your paragraphs properly, or everything will be a big text block.
But by now you should have a pretty lynx-friendly site. Simple? It is.
As a side note, I tried out this myself on a small and simple site project I had lately, and in addition to the latest Netscape and IE browsers, it also works great great in lynx. (If anybody cares, it's here and in Swedish).
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
I think the general trend towards graphics everything, no decent text navigation sucks, period, and I think it's going to get worse, not better.
We have some people where I work (an ad agency) that totally ignored the internet and now are trying to get involved in web site creation. The problem is their background is in TV production, NOT web site design, so their idea of a "cool" web site is one with loads of Flash, javascript and lots of other "multimedia" junk.
I'm sure this trend will continue as more corporate types with brand new G4/PIIIs on their desk do nothing but look at splash screens and determine what's a good site and what's not..
When the recent lawsuit against AOL was posted on Slashdot, some very common themes in the responses were "should the net be run by lawyers?" and "let market forces provide access instead of some bureaucrat!". (Not to mention the "blind people can't surf anyway!")
In this article, the common theme seems to be that "those evil lawyers for BigCo are discriminatory", and "there oughtta be a law, because it's obvious that market forces aren't helping people with disabilities".
Maybe it's just a different group of people reading and responding to the two articles?
A good friend of mine is blind. I can tell you from my conversations with him that all the crap "look what I can do in java!" stuff and lack of alt= tags really irritates him. He is a websurfing fool, so for the folks at Adventis to say "So? How many blind people will visit our site?" is something I find very irritating and unfortunately it is not just them that is thinking this way.
When I design my webpages, I don't give a rat's patoot what anyone in corporate thinks - I always design them with my blind friend in mind and I stick with it.
I used to run no images, but after getting junkbuster I find the images left over less annoying (most of the time!). Still run /. in light mode, though.
Perhaps being slashdotted will make them realize that while there may be a minority of visually impaired customers, they certainly create a sense of outrage by being so callous.
But, this being America, nothing short of losing a multimillion dollar lawsuit will convince them of anything.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
i web-browz on a fairly high-speed connection, and i still don't typically load images. it's the difference between "instantaneous" and "fast", and often filters out the "content" i'd try to ignore anyway (like ads) while permitting the content i want.
Although I found a list of some browsers, I did not find a page which describes behavior of various cell phone browsers. Anyone notice such a page?
---
Good HTML should be written in brail.
You turds, you.
Find a blind friend. I have one and she's quite technically competent for a non-programmer. She just can't see. Put your friend in front of a Linux box with Emacspeak loaded on it. If your friend can navigate the site, it is probably sufficiently friendly for the blind. I've been trying to get her to visit Slashdot to tell me what she thinks. She told me Saturday night that she hasn't been here ... yet.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
When commenting on an article about accessibility and non-discrimination, is it necessary to annoy gay people also? Get a clue, dude. What else do you punch and destroy? Rob, thanks once again for the free beer.
You have learned to use alt="" with spacers.
You have found out that HR loads faster and looks better than graphic ruler bars.
Your graphics all contain proper alt= attributes and your tables contain summary attributes.
You have properly used the Meta Tag
But you are not yet a webmaster.
For, although your page is truly viewable in any browser, and is completely accessable to people of all disabilities, quit frankly my son, your page looks like festering backside of a unwashed gibbon.
--
But Master, I followed all of w3.org's reccomendations. I used tidy and bobby, and checked all the links. I didn't use CSS because every browser interprets them differently. I rejected tables as they work differently on different browsers (especially table background images). I did my best to make sure that it looked just as good on Lynx as it does in Gecko!
---
And that is the problem my son. All pages look like junk in Lynx. However, AOL users are spoiled little pigs. In the process to make your page appeal to the 10% of people who don't support the current IE and Netscape browsers, you have offended the other 90%. Go back and try again.
-----
The author is currently the webmaster of virtualsurreality.com. He has learned that even w3.org is still in confusion about the <p> tag and that table backgrounds are questionable (as can be seen by comparing his main page under Netscape and I.E.). He is however in love with Tidy.
-----
No Zen is good zen
Having worked as a web developer for both small companies and a large corporation I think the explanation is quite simple. The webmaster at a small company is likely to be an outside graphic artist or a secondary task for an internal staffer. Seeing as how both may use graphical editors to build their site, it is easy to overlook alt tags (not exactly a high visibility feature in most editors). More frightenly, the webmaster at a large corporation is very likely a marketing wunderkid who knows NOTHING about either design or HTML. The IT department sets up the servers and then releases this guy to do his best (or worst). I dont think its a diabolical plot to disadvantage the disabled but rather a case of ignorance or worse, incompetence.
It's not just blind users who suffer from image-intensive pages; it's bandwidth-limited users. When I login over a modem (at home) or when on the road with my laptop, I have my browser set so that image-loading is off by default. I click on the "show images" icon when I absolutely have to have images to navigate the page. Then I usually wait for 2 minutes for it to load.
Executives generally don't care about the blind or slow-bandwidth, thinking that in business terms they won't be potential customers. But I have a solution for that. You have to convince the executive that other "high-end" people will be similarly frustrated.
I think if you show an executive how fast the page-load speed from a "executive dialing in on a laptop on the road", you could make a persuasive case for alt-tags for faster navigation. And point out that the new WAP-oriented phones with web browsing (also used by executives) will have the same problem.
--LP
As I recall, Tim Berners-Lee created the web to improve communication among researchers. You can see this in many places, but more often than not researchers bury papers in the PDF. (What is the correct setting to launch gv with the file from NS 4.7 anyway? My system always opens a blank page.)
Commercialization has brought the poor advertising strategy of most companies to the web. The strategy is poor because the advertisements aren't advertisements! They are merely product propaganda with little information. Ad designers need to drop the assumption that people are cows; if they don't, they might discover that a raging cow is more fearsome than a bull (female of a non-sentient species and all that...).
Part of the problem is the poor characterization of capitalism that predominates in most people's minds. Capitalism is not about competition. Competition is merely one aspect of the capitalism. But almost everyone, pro and con, thinks they are equivalent. Competition can exist in the absence of a free market; for what people compete is what changes. Under the best system, what competition occurs is to create a better product. Slightly worse is the system in which people compete for market share. And in the worst systems people compete for the favor of a man with power over life or death.
But there is no universal law that says we have to compete. When we chant 'nos morituri te salutamus', there is no one listening. There is no playing field but for that which is encircled by the dogs which would keep themselves in chains.
If only that legendary French baker had said to the king's emissary, "Let me alone, and I'll let everyone else alone." But he didn't, and now people think that laissez-faire is as far as civil society goes. Well, it doesn't; and the reason to be left alone by the government is not so that you try to rule other people. But people have to stop thinking in terms of masters and slaves.
There is no scarcity. Nothing is more than what it is, but there is plenty of everything. One might say that time is scarce, but really you have your whole life. If people stop believing that there is a sum of wealth forever fixed for a slice of which they must fight, then perhaps the competition will end.
When people know what is, they can act upon it. When people can act freely, they can be happy. When people choose to be happy, they can learn many things.
The web was created to improve cooperation. Ignore the forces which would work against that, but don't let them meddle with your affairs. The web, like the software that created and sustains it, is for sharing. Let those who would compete remain chained one to another their cave. But do not go there, and do not let them take you.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Well, I actually *tried* using CSS in one of my homepages, and boy it sucked. You can't be sure wether your snazzy background image for that TD element will be rendered or not (with Netscape, it was not).
I *hate* webs that forbid non- Flash users from navigating them. But look, if we coded our pages like some of the people here wish, we would get Eric S. Raymond's website.
And frankly, it *sucks*. Wonderful content, but a horrible design.
Look, 95% of today's web design is made with tables. I *know* it looks like hell in text browsers, but I think the web is a visual medium. And if a browser can't render a perfectly valid HTML 2.0 element... dump it.
My latest website's splash page tries to resemble a Japanese nishiki-e painting. If I added a text navigation the whole point would be missed, but all the links are scrupulously ALT tagged. The table formatting in the content pages can be a bit funny, but hey, I want it to look *good* in any browser, even Mosaic. All the information is textual, images are only used to *add* feeling, not to *provide content*.
Honestly, I think this should suffice. If anyone wants to check it, do it.
--Hikari
--Hikari
"Long distance information/ Disconnect me if you can/ On Detonation Boulevard..."
I highly suggest (and force on my web admins and designers) the new W3C Recommendation for building tools that support sites that provide accessible content. Such guidelines can be utilized by hand-designers to create aesthetic, useable, and accessible web experiences for all. Every time I access a web page that provides a poor user experience for non-mainstream browsers (I used lynx and w3-mode quite a bit), I email a standard letter to the webmaster that provides some guidelines and references for such. Even if 5% of /.ers did that, the world might start shifting toward a better place.
Joseph R. Kiniry
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~kiniry/
California Institute of Technology
Joseph R. Kiniry
http://kind.ucd.ie/~kiniry/
Lecturer
UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics
The issue may have legal reprecussions in addition to the obvious moral ones. Check out Section 508 of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, esp. this tidbit:
My reading of this legalese is that any company that wants to do business with the Federal government has to make corporate information easily accessible to all.
I've noticed more websites without feedback links or "webmaster" email addresses. They're only interested in communicating one way. I suspect this is deliberate in a lot of cases.
How do you run Slashdot in lite mode?
You know, Cliff et al., I really think it would be better to post the teaser and then reply to it yourself, rather than insert your own editorial comment along with the teaser. You are simply the person who decides to post the story to Slashdot; you're not the be-all, end-all person to comment on the story. This way, we're forced to read your little comment whether or not it has merit, and it cannot be moderated at all. I think this should go for all of Slashdot--Rob, Hemos, everybody. If you want to insert your particular questionably witty and possibly important dialogue, then reply to your own story. Let's have some news without bias, please!
As to your specific comment, I don't like people not using ALT tags either. But it's possible that these people simply forgot, or that their Web person forgot. It's not a heinous crime, for crying out loud. Now that it's been brought to light, it will most likely be fixed. Has anyone considered sending an email to the Web person, asking why ALT tags weren't used, and possibly explaining their value? Huh? Or are we simply going to bitch in 400+ comments like we always do, making ourselves feel self-important, and accomplishing nothing?
So pointless.
The problem is that newer versions of web browsers RUINED the ALT tags by DISPLAYING them!!!
...
Now in every current copy of IE and Netscape when you hover over a graphic you get an ALT tag pop-up in your face.
Now while on a page with mostly text and a few graphics this may not be a problem
But take that site given in the article. If you put ALT tags on the navigation, the pop-up text will appear over TOP of the other options, thus making the menu very hard to use.
We had the same problem back a while ago when making a site for kids, where we had ALT tags on the graphics, but the tags popping up when on the menu text, ended up hiding the actual roll-over text that we were putting in an adjacent image.
We had to take the tags out because of every single teacher we showed the site to calling it unuseable because of that problem.
If web browsers wouldn't do that pop-up thing, I would LOVE to put alt text everywhere!
Bottom line. Waaay more people are multimedia enabled. The rest don't matter. Simple, eh?
This doesn't seem to be Corporate America not realizing that the 'net has NON-techies, but the other way around. Joe Q. NetSurfer loves image-happy sites, even if they take ages to load. It's the techies that browse with images off, or with Lynx, and like to see text-based navigation and alt= tags.
Anyway, it is a problem, but the best way to vote is with your wallet, so to speak. I buy a lot of computer hardware, as I'm sure much of us do, and I tend not to buy from vendors whose sites are bogged down with images, Java[Script], or, I shudder to think, Macromedia. And I outright refuse to buy from vendors whose sites don't work at all in Linux Netscape. For this pharmaceutical company, the story is a bit different. I imagine they're not conducting any actual commerce on their site, merely offering information. But the same principle can still be applied: browsing their site is a pain? Go elsewhere! And if you feel strongly about it, write the webmaster to tell them why you've decided to take your business elsewhere.
MoNsTeR
app_name %s
in your case: gv %s
I think he meant in the preferences or customize home page for /
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I think he meant in the preferences or customize home page for /.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
My former employer, Coleman Research Corporation. Dig that huge GIF content pane! My good friend is the system administrator there, but the graphics department were the ones that came up with it.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
<!-- Greetings, Lynx users. There is a reason this page doesn't use ALT tags on the images. The reason is that the bozos responsible for both MSIE and Netscape Confusicator 4.0 decided that they would display the ALT tags of images every time you move the mouse over them -- even if the images are loaded, and even if they are not links. The ALT attribute to the IMG tag is supposed to be used *instead of* the image, not *in addition to* the image.
This looks absolutely terrible, so I don't use ALT tags any more in self-defense.
If they wanted to implemented tooltips, they should have used the TITLE attribute to the A tag. That's in the HTML 1.2 spec and everything.
I had to decide between making this page look good for the vast majority of viewers, or making it be readable by the miniscule minority of you stuck in the 70s. Those of you in the retro contingent lost. Sorry. -->
You don't have to have two separate pages. It's a common misconception (typically among inexperienced web authors) that in order to have a good looking web page accessible to people light on bandwidth or handicapped, that you have to have a separate version of the site for them.
Any professional web author will tell you that it really can be done on the same page:
1. Never use images to convey textual information. This prevents the information from being indexed in search engines and otherwise made available to non-graphical clients.
2. Use HTML markup intelligently. Lots of today's sites are simply huge tables with a bunch of images in it. HTML tags are incorrectly used for things like spacing and fonts, when instead they should be used to designate different types of text in the document.
It really isn't difficult at all to build a very nice-looking web site that works well with lesser browsers. All it takes is some education/training on the part of the author. HTML people are a dime a dozen nowadays, and, sadly, many large firms think that they're all the same. I mean, if two different web authors can end up building web pages that look basically the same, they must both be of equal skill, right? Try looking at the HTML source code once in a while, and try viewing those pages in a variety of other browsers.
As people start migrating to 4.x and higher browsers, it's time we started paying attention to things like strict HTML4 and CSS. If you can build a page correctly using HTML4 (which forbids HTML attributes and tags designed to change how a page is displayed) and CSS (which is designed to precisely control how a page is rendered), it will typically look great in text-to-speech browsers (and even better in those that themselves support CSS).
When I was first trying to test the web site I was working of for accessibility, I went out and got the IBM HomePage Reader, figured out how the commands worked, then turned off my monitor for the afternoon.
It was a very educational experience, and one that more people should do now and then. You get a better appreciation of what is going on, and you will never leave out alt tags after that.
There is no silver bullet. Plus, werewolves make better neighbors than zombies or vampires anyway.
And without text, they are opening themselves up to an Americans With Disabilities lawsuit. Even if they win, they'll lose far more in legal fees than they would spend properly tagging the site - especially considering that they will tag the site dooner or later.
Stupidity is always its own reward.
If you think corporate sites are bad, take a look at just about any popular web designers'. 90% of them are cluttered messes of jargon and obfuscation, albeit very nice to look at. Organization is hidden behind mysterious content sections entitled things like "Feed," if there are titles at all. Navigation menus are totally irrelevant buttons or pictures, the meaning of which can only be gleaned if you move your mouse over every damn one to see the rollover. You're lucky if there's any actual text not in a graphic.
Sorry to get on my soapbox. The point is, these are sites designed by artists and advertisers, not by information architects as they should be. Few corporations know about usability testing; few web design firms do either, for that matter. We can only hope as these people start discovering that they actually are losing appreciable business through poor usability (a Forrester study found that approximately 50% of sales at major corporate storefronts were lost because customers couldn't navigate the site), more attention will be payed to the user experience and less to empty flash.
"If you look 'round the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Quiz Show
And I thought I was the only one still stuck at 26400. I'm in bandwidth hell - 26400 at home, and my server colocated on a T3.
So the off topic question - what do people that rely heavily on the internet for income do in a situation like this? I know I'm not the only one that likes to live in the middle of nowhere, yet still be connected. Aside from a leased line or a satellite, I think I'm going to be stuck at this horrible speed for some time to come.
As far as graphics are concerned - I still use lynx frequently, and most of the pages I load are not graphics intensive.
One more offtopic bit - I've been reading usenet with tin on my server through supernews, because even the article headers take a prohibitive amount of time to transfer at this speed. Any better solutions out there?
From the top of the Post Comment page on Slashdto:
Hmm...where's the ALT tag? I hate corporate idiots who don't include ALT tags.
Oops that didn't work. Anyway, there are numerous graphics on Slashdot that don't have ALT tags. Typical Geek indignation. Is Katz writing *everything* here now?
Not to mention there probably is no way their website will work on wireless devices. I'm not sure how those translators work but I would bet they really heavily on those "alt" tags.
What does the page look like while it downloads?
With tooltips and a little care on the background colors, you can code a page that looks, well, less than completely stinky while the browser builds it.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
We apologize for the inconvenience.
FrontPage does, by default, only put file name and file size in an ALT tag, but that can be fixed by either going into the image properties (by right-clicking on the image) or by editing the source directly in FP. The only problem I've seen with FP and ALT tags is that it's impossible to create a blank ALT by using ALT="" ; FP98 renders this as ALT= . I have no idea if it's been fixed in FP2K.
Exactly my point with ALT tags.
Jamie actually has a better idea than I did. All I wanted was the ability to turn off tool tips, either as a client option or as a code instruction on the page (better yet) so it wouldn't interfere with rollovers.
_____
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
What I would like to see more of is a link (in raw text form) on the front page of the website that clicking it will lead to a text only version of the site, this kind of a sub-site doesn't neccessarily have to look good as a blind person wouldn't be able to see it anyways but would allow greater accessability and a no frills option for people with slow connections, physical limitations, or software limitations while would make the main site difficult or unusable. If this became a standard practice there'd be less complaints about sites not being "lynx friendly" or people just going to another site because that one is taking too long to load (as text-only loads very quickly even on slow connections). Text only versions should not be overly expensive to produce.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
I applaud people's efforts to bring attention to this issue (slashdot has itself run a couple articles, both on the AOL-ADA lawsuit and did a Q&A on internet accessability for the handicapped a while ago), just as I applaud people's efforts to bring attention to the Free Tibet campaign. But I can't help but wonder whether, like with Free Tibet, people get involved, not because they truly care deeply about the principles at hand (although they might also do that), but because it's an easy cause with only one rational side to choose and which they can fight at no cost to them. Who wouldn't want to help the blind?
This point can be made about nearly any political cause, so let me explain why I make it about this one: people will say they care, and they might even make a half-assed attempt to comply with the dictates of these principles, but when push comes to shove, they will not forgo doing what they would've already done simply because of their allegiance to a political belief. They'll wave their flag and chant their slogans, and then they'll go home and quietly forget to implement the very changes they demanded. The 'cool' factor is just too dominant. The trend is away from text-accessability and towards whizbang GUIs, and we'll all suffer from it, blind or visually empowered. I hope to be proven wrong on this matter and hope to see a massive consumer revolt in favor of ALT tags and the like (logical formatting, not lexical formatting), but I'm not holding my breath.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
There are major corporations with web sites which have no addresses nor phone numbers listed. A potential customer has to do separate searches and filter out the companies with the same name which are in other fields of business.
What, no one here heard of Marshall McCluhan? Why is everyone convinced that the web has to be accessible, let alone information loaded?
It is absurd to believe that marketing concepts and nifty ideas are secondary to the functionality. Form IS function. The image you put out on the web is your image, to be tailored as you see fit. What a bunch of pesky little geek boys are doing complaining about their ideas not being used is beyond me.
Get over it. Your ideas are not given ex cathedra. Let the medium evolve on its own!
While I have sympathy for the disabled, and even agree with the ADA in general, this is ridiculous. The web is naturally evolving into a graphically rich source of information that could not be expressed in words. You might as well demand that art museums be prohibited from exhibiting paintings, and only be allowed to display sculptures, since the blind can feel sculptures but not paintings.
Like all technological problems, there is a techological solution. Optical Character Recognition technology is well advanced, and can be quite reliable when you don't have to do OCR on a scan of a crappy FAX. There is nothing stopping a group of disability-activists from developing their own browser accessories that can OCR and decode text presented in graphical format.
I'm sorry, the burden is on the user. I'm not going to dumb-down the graphics on my sites for anyone!
While writing an article in slashdot is a good idea, most of us are probably already aware of this issue (personally not only I use almost no images in my web pages, but I also take the trouble to use a <span lang="..."> tag whenever I introduce a quote in a foreign language, so that a text to speech translator could presumably make the right decisions; and when I'm not too lazy, I even use the <abbr> quote for abbreviations — anyway, here is not the place to brag about my HTML coding style).
I think you should contact the W3 Consortium instead. This sort of thing is precisely their raison d'être. They have written many advocacy documents and editorials on similar subjects, and they probably have one targeting this precise problem. The moral authority of the W3 Consortium, although thin, is still stronger than an individual's, and they might have a better chance to convince a reluctant webmaster.
Many corporate web sites are unaccessible. Webpagesthatsuck.com.
Amen. Way too many big corporations, some small ones, as well as some non-profit organisations, waste their money and squander my and everyone else's limited bandwiwdth and time with overdone graphics and gimmicks that make their sites less accessible to those who are visually impaired, and less accessible and harder to navigate for just about everyone else. I'm stuck on a 56k connection and if I visit some sites, those of the auto companies here in my native Detroit are among the worst offenders,it can take three to five minutes to load one page! Many of these sites won't work at all if you don't have the latest versions of IE or Netscape, if you're browsing with BeOS or in console mode on Linux you are SOL. What is worse is what a pain many of these sites are to navigate even if you have a supported browser and aren't disabled, Ford's and Saabs sites are particularly bad, you can't even find a webmaster's address to send complaints to.
The only redeeming feature about this is that on many of these sites it really doesn't matter if they aren't accessible because they have so little worthwhile information on them. It's as if they never considered why they might need a website but just decided that they had to have one and it might as well be "state of the art" with all the available bells and whistles.
So, give us a break all you high flying web designers and quit wasting my bandwidth and my time and just keep it simple and give me some useful information instead of a pointless sensory assault.
My $.02
Just for a little perspective... I'm blind, and I work for a major technical corporation, doing technical support. I find that a lot of web pages (including ours!) have many problems with accessibility. My textreader absolutely chokes with most pages that are out there now, and I have to jump thru hoops to make it read Slashdot. I think that people who say "Well, how many blind people surf anyway?" ought to be shot. Just my $0.02.
billh, get a UNIX account that is on a fast connection and fast server. Then, do your newsgroup reader when you telnet/ssh to there. That's what I am doing.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Are there any emulators that can emulate a phone browser? Here's a WebTV emulator: http://developer.webtv.net/design/tools/viewer/Def ault.htm if you are wanting to test sites with it.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Very true. I'm proud to say that yes, I use Lynx. Not as my main browser, but I use it. But it's getting harder with all these glitzy fucking websites.
I mentioned this in another discussion today. Here it is again:
This is the company that bought Andover.net. Rob, say the nice ALT tags aren't going away! SAy it ain't so!
***
Although the letter didn't ask for it, if this bothers you, write to Aventis Pharmaceuticals about this matter. Remember, be polite, but firm.
Demonstrant's Open Source Tools
(There goes the Karma)...
:-)
This is really busted... Sure, there are a lot of _us_ using lynx, but you find me more than 3 newbies who aren't using netscape or explorer?
And the blind thing? Most websites use Alt tags. I don't. I know, I'm a sinner, but most people can see, and it f***s up when all the images have alt tags while they're loading, and I f***ing hate mousovers that popup over my links, that's what the status bar is for.
And the site in question???? I'm sorry, but if my chemist is blind, I'm going to a different chemist. And who else but your chemist or the odd journalist is going to be reading a pharmaceutical (sp?) website?
Phew! Now I've got that off my chest, I'm about to wear a big -1 for not wanting lynx users complaining when my shopping carts don't work
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
We did the first of our accessibility 'white papers' on the presidential candidate sites. Nobody passed nuthin! (And didn't care when we contacted them. Vote for nobody?)
http://orbitaccess.com/presidential/
Dennis
It's easy to make the site reasonably accessible to most browsers. Unfortunately, most webdesigners will not do anything like that because, however easy it is, it's still easier to focus on overall look and feel on latest v4,5 browsers.
/. , freshmeat, gnu.org, google.com, so on. Once in a while I *have* to go to a site that is unreadable in lynx and I have to start netscape and it's a pain but that doesn't happen often.
Part of the problem is that web design field is very competitive with low entry barrier and at the same time it's really tough to make a good-looking site even if you focus on making it look good and forget about accessibility. Why? Because HTML was _not_ meant for tricks people are trying to pull off with it. That's why all visual design tools suck ass - they're trying to build a skyscraper with spherical bricks.
In a modern site, almost every HTML tag is abused and misused. In fact, if they're not, this immediately gives away that the designer is not a professional.
As a full-time web designer who is trying to keep his sites accessible and stylish at the same time, I can tell you this: clients don't give a shit about accessibility even when you explain them. They'd rather have you spend that extra day putting more eye candy in.
The problem is, most sites are used as an adverticement/brochure. People care about investors, business partners and so on who come to the site and get an "impression".
Therefore, the only thing that matters is that the site must look expensive, glamorous and high-tech.
Is there a way out? Not anytime soon. At the meantime, we'll do what we do: stick to nice usable websites that focus on information and service, like
This is all.
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
went out and got the IBM HomePage Reader
Well done. That's one of our first accessibility tests ... in fact, I started doing accessibility testing when blind and deaf users started complaining about my Kalvos & Damian site. We hardly miss an ALT now and are transcribing our interviews as fast as we can!
Dennis
http://orbitaccess.com/presidential/
Here is $.02 from a webmaster of a "mutli-platforms" medium site that MUST works with browsers from 3.0+ on Mac/PC/Linux:
:), I can clean up my site with a simple script that will strip aways all the dirty attributes!
;)
The one big reason for any website not to use pure HTML4.0/CSS is because of Netscape's JavaScript bug (turning off JavaScript, will also disable CSS. Don't ask me why). Because of all the script-related problems, it is just sensible to disable it altogether. However this type of "pure" pages look horrible if CSS is turned off.
So like people with visual disabilities, script-less browsers (as in software and people) are just one more groups a good designer should consdier when building a website.
Therefore I was forced to create pages that use both CSS and HTML attributes, just so they look more or less the same on netscape with no script and other (better) browsers. My hope is that in the near future (1 to 2 years for Mozilla to take over the world
As to those sites with just one big Flash as the front page, vote with your browser and ignore them like the plague that they are.
(While we are at it, cookies should be banned too! But that is another thread altogether
Anti-Cookies != Anonymous Coward
As it happens, I work for the Large Blue Company which has the IT support contract for Aventis North America. The whole merger happened really fast so I can't be 100% certain, but I'm 98% sure, based on how things worked pre-merger, that the entire Aventis website (and, indeed, nearly all big corporate websites for non-IT companies) was developed by one big-name marketing company or another, with only your standard cursory level of content approval coming from the Aventis side.
;-)
This isn't in any way to excuse either the webmasters or Aventis itself, but rather to emphasize the point that these are highly-overcompensated full-time web designers/marketers making these errors. One would reasonably expect any web designer at any corporation to understand things like the importance of alt tags & text links for disability access access; one should out-and-out *demand* such understanding from the highly-paid "professionals" who do nothing all day but design big glossy corporate sites.
I'll ask around & see if I can find out which big high-powered marketing firm did the work so we can hassle them some more.
Posted anonymously because, yes, I'm a coward when it comes to my paycheck
The LONGDESC tag, as defined in HTML 4.0 is not displayed as a pop-up on images in IE, and probably not in Netscape either (I don't have it handy to test). And although I can't say for sure, I wouldn't be surprised if page readers could use the LONGDESC tag just fine.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
As a handicapped person myself I don't buy the notion that everyone else in the civilized world has to go out of their way to accomodate my handicap. I think this is largely and excuse for more government intrusion in people's lives and in business especially.
I recently applied for a web designer job and recieved an interview. At the interview, they asked to see the pages I'd previously created. The person doing the interview made the comment that '..any housewife could download a program and make pages like that in a weekend..'. He further pointed out my lack of flash animations, javascripts, rollover images, etc.
The websites I displayed had been created exactly as the people I was doing them for had wanted. In fact, there had been a few comments about there being too much graphics, etc due to bandwidth restrictions.
When you combine this with the article on slashdot a while ago (2-3 weeks?) about how most people are still using 56k dialups or slower, making glitzy websites for potential customers seems like a really silly thing to do. Why would a customer be impressed with your company if your company's website takes 15 minutes to load and requires the installation of 2 new plugins?
As well, I agree with an earlier post that consulting the HTML coding of a page can tell you a thing or two about the person who designed it. I spoke with one 'webmaster' whose idea of a well-designed page was one done with the program arachnophilia. They knew only a few things about HTML and nothing about JavaScript/Perl or other languages. Yet they were in charge of the organization's website. Myself, I usually use a graphical webpage building program (I'm liking Macromedia Dreamweaver right now..), but I always view the HTML code of what I'm working on and tweak it a bit as I go.
-Dexx
"..and ten billion sushi dinners cried out for vengeance.." -Good Omens
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/absitesresult.s html
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
What ever happened to link rev, and the heirarchy of documents? Is this the current implementation of it?
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
So long as we're picking on sites for not being "correct"... umm... and I hate to say this... but /. isn't exactly an angel...
Take a look at slashdot.org's w3c validation results and I think you'll find Mr slasdot.org isn't all that conformant.
I think it's not so much the corporate's responsibility than the webdesign company who formed the page. They should be aware of this, and that's why companies hire them; because they know how to form a page and make it accessible, and so on.
One of the main worries is the enforcement of standards in browsers. If browsers just enforced correct html...
Maybe XML will help.
But until then you just cannot enforce ppl to use correct html.
The only thing you can do is create attention for it.
Perhaps a top 100 worst standards sites, per site type.. you need a lot of room for the baddies, would help..
Who was it again, that said, the beauty of standards is there is so many to choose from?
We need to teach the masses... What better way then to nail them in public.
Greetz SlashDread
i'm glad your an anonymous cowboy.
I work in the whole alt tag area on sites.
I believe all sites should be at least 70% text, and then some images. and they should be tagged.
it makes things easier when viewing it thru lynx, links etc.
and whats all this everyone is multimedia enabled, the rest doesn't matter?
get with it. i don't think this was created for the "everyone" (closed minority/majority).
If your gonna do something like that, then I ain't gonna view your sites.
Content is king, and that means content for everyone.
bBt
jethro_thull@hotmail.com
gimme text baby!
The real culprits here are the web design houses - particularly those from long-established marketing organisations that suddenly decided to join the new media boom. They declared themselves to be "web designers" simply by changing the notepaper, not changing the working practices.
Corporate buyers of web presence are often more used to buying magazine or TV coverage. They have no knowledge of what "good web" ought to look like, not are they likely to improve. A single magazine ad might be delegated to a junior, but a single web site is such a large single investment that it's likely to attract their marketing head honcho. Given the corporate sluggardliness of these people, they're unlikely to be young enough, or technically literate enough, to have much a clue web-wise.
I'm a self-employed freelance, but I'm currently working for just such a web design house. This place embarasses me, and their work is shoddy in exactly the way this article complains of. As an example, a "creative spec" for a page is a single 640x480 bitmap. That's magazine thinking; seeing content as being a single static image and taking no account of how it can be implemented, how it changes with window size, how it degrades across browsers, or accessibility. I've had meetings where major content loss of function is swept under the carpet, but changing a simple bitmap (logo or screen background) is regarded as an earth shattering change.
If web-buildng is done by people who understand nothing more than the look of a static image, then that's what you'll get as a site.
What bugs me the most is that Netscape Communicator has a nasty bug where it will leak memory due to poor rendering with a lot of tables.
LOL. Netscape will leak memory just sitting there. A friend of mine likes to leave Netscape open for long periods of time (he has a DSL line, so he probably doesn't want to wait for it to load up). Anyway, he posted a line from top on a mailing list a while ago showing Netscape using 440 megs of memory.
Currently, Netscape is using 32 megs on my machine. When I checked an hour ago, it was 16... when Mozilla hits beta I'm switching.
Blind people can use a computer. When I first started work as a programmer 20 years ago, the place where I worked had 3 blind programmers (one was a section leader and later became a department head) who used Braille terminals. Their productivity and accuracy was just as good as us sighted programmers (and better than some!)
billh, get a UNIX account that is on a fast connection and fast server. Then, do your newsgroup reader when you telnet/ssh to there. That's what I am doing.
Same here. I'm on 56K, but I admin a half dozen machines on an educational network. It's not super fast (I think the pipe is only 40m/s), but pretty decent.
This thread interests me, since I have just spent my university holiday doing work for a company which involved upgrading their site. The company, which specialises in products for people with a wide range of impairments (mainly vision impairment though), needed to give their website a facelift. One of the prime requirements, of course, was to have the site fully accessible. What I found over the course of my work was that making a website accessible is NOT hard. Not only that, but it is highly rewarding and it really does give you a new outlook on designing web pages. I'd like to share some of the things that I discovered, in case they help anybody. Creating accessible websites is about creating GOOD websites. Every single user of the site will benefit if the site is more accessible. Likewise, if you consider writing HTML somewhat of an artform, then I can tell you that creating a good looking webpage that is very accessible, is indeed an artform in itself and it proves very rewarding. We need to think of webpages in many different contexts, not just being viewed on a computer screen under a particular browser. With a webpage, you define content and style, and then a browser takes that definition (in the form of your HTML files and your CSS files) and paints it to the screen. Suppose instead though that the browser was to take your website and read it out to a person? Suppose you had a browser which allows you to call up a window with a menu of links on the current page, so you could jump to one instantaneously? Or suppose you had a utility which automatically downloaded and summarised your favorite sites, and E-mailled them to you? By making your website more accessible, you make it more accessible to these tools also. Search engines can index your site better (more hits). People can be free to view your site from their palm-pilot, their web-enabled phone, or their text console, because your site does not fall over and die unless it is viewed using Netscape in a 1024x768 window on a PC. Your website becomes accessible to many many more people. You also get the satisfaction of knowing that everyone has a chance to use your website. This problem hits particularly close to home for me, because I have a vision impairment. I am lucky in that it does not stop me from using a computer or a normal browser, however I've seen the problems that others face with inaccessible websites. I'm interested in writing a small guide, mainly aimed at web authors just starting out, or web authors who want to take their existing site and make it more accessible. If anyone would be interested in this, E-mail me at: mcarneva22@hotmail.com Cheers, Matthew Carnevale
I hope you don't lose your eyesight, you may change your mind on that. Or lose your hearing, you may suddenly miss the music you used to listen to. Stop being selfish, and think of other people for a change. If you live long enough, you will lose you perfect eyesight and your hearing. Try this: Turn your monitor off, and try using your computer with a speech synth. Stephen Still got eyesight and hearing, but working on a project for blind/partially sighted part of the time. snail_at_objmediaDOTdemonDOTcoDOTuk
Yeah, I have seen Netscape Communicator v4.7 suck up 300 MB of my damn swap file on Win98, P2-300, and 128 MB RAM. I will get the beta as well as long as it is stable and can replace 4.x.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
No images, please; we're impatient. This is especially true at home, using a 14.4 Kb/s (!) modem.
bool_t obsolete = (paid_for && works);
14.4k?!?!? What da?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).