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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."
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.
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.
- 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
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
-- 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.
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
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
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.
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!"
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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No Zen is good zen
>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.
And if people go to classes, looking to buy a clue, they don't get value for their dollar spent.
A friend of mine started a web development program at a local university, & one of the requirements to pass the introductory class was to be able to create a floppy to boot from DOS from.
Yeah, right: your $50K UNIX server running on a sparc chip crashes, & you're REALLY going to fix it by booting DOS on the system. I doubt this is useable information even for NT servers. (``Uh, I booted to DOS, but fdisk is reporting non-DOS partitions on all of my drives. Should I reformat & reinstall?")
Needless to say, my pal dropped out of the program.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Probably not. That would be "forced speech", which is a First Amendment violation. US publishers can't be forced to produce translations of works into other languages. The same applies to translation to other forms such as audio. Even TV closed captioning isn't required by law, although broadcast regulation is more restrictive than speech generally because the spectrum is regulated as a public resource.
Actually, it's not a lot of work to duplicate the site, if the developers go about it properly -- using m4 macros to generate different versions of the html, for example. I think they just can't be bothered -- "if it looks good in IE, it'll do", is an attitude that's all too common.
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.
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
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).
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?
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.
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.
I think the Web is primarily a visual medium and as such many people are going to be left out.
Radio is INTRINSICALLY an auditory medium. The web is not intrinsically visual.
As a humorous side note, not thinking about disabilities can get you into trouble. There was a commercial that featured people talking over a desk with a voiceover. They weren't going to be heard, so they were told to just talk about anything. They chose to tell dirty jokes.
The ad was pulled later when deaf people called and complained about it. One of the guys' lips were visable. OOOPS!
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.
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Do I look like I speak for my employer?
Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKlein Beecham
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Nah, that's easy. I can tell you're right-handed: you're assuming the mouse is on the right side of the keyboard... :-)
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The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
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.