Corporate Websites and the Lack of Accessibility

Mighty E asks: "It seems that Corporate America (and Corporate The World) has not yet come to the realization that the Internet is no longer limited to techies. I am a techie working for a global pharmaceutical, which is about to go through a merger to make it into the largest pharmaceutical in the world, Aventis Pharmaceuticals. The new Web site depends solely on images for navigation, and there is not a single alt= tag on the site. Therefore, blind users cannot use the site." This practice bothers me. Not only does it make browsing difficult for the disabled, but it also interferes with text-only browsers and text-to-speech engines. Not a smart practice. (More)

"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."

Comments

Not easy, but there's hope

[fremen]

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.

Not just the blind

[Error 404]

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

Webmaster target to specific browsers too

[hub]

One of the things that makes me sad about the WWW today is that:

1. 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
2. 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)
3. 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.
4. Some of them even require proprietary technology like Flash.

I really miss the time were browsing was doable with NCSA Mosaic.

Other good reasons.

[gregbaker]

Not only does it make browsing difficult for the disabled, but it also interferes with text-only browsers and text-to-speech engines.

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

[Offtopic] Search Engines / images

[scrutty]

Vaguely following your thread, I only found out very recently that you can use av.com/?text=Y to use the portalized version of altavista in a text only version that is extemely modem friendly.

W3C Accessibility Guidelines

[wheezy]

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

Accessibility - Design Resources on the web

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Why web pages suck.

[hey!]

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).

Making Websites Accessible is BOTH easy and right

[Shin Dig]

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:

• Look really good in multiple browsers
• Load faster cause you don't have silly font tags all over the place
• way easier to maintain and modify in the future

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.

Shame on the "powers that be"

[Randy Rathbun]

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.

Re:Its not just corporate sites

[NettRom]

Actually, I think the idea of rendering them as tooltips isn't such a bad idea. I mean, what do you usually put in the alt tag anyway? Usually you don't want to describe what the picture is in an alt tag, you want to tell them what would happen if they clicked on that picture.

There's two things that need to be kept as separate entities here. One is the ALT attribute, which is to be used as alternative content shown to those who do not see the image.

Then there's the tooltip (or an equivalent thereof), which can tell a user what to expect behind a link.

HTML 4.0 takes care of both of these. The IMG element has an ALT attribute, which is defined to be used as alternative content (not surprisingly). The A (anchor) element has a TITLE attribute which is to be used to describe what lies behind the link. This can again be rendered as a tooltip, Microsoft Internet Explorer 4/5 does that.

This is to keep two things separate. Not all images are links, and not all links are images. By doing it this way it's easy to give useful content to those without images, and it's also easy to describe what's behind a link. Then it's up to the user agent (e.g. browser) to render the information in a useful way.

Convincing the PHB that alt-tags are good

[LinuxParanoid]

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

This isn't true at all

[Fastolfe]

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).

Re:Simpler browsers will save us

[Mr. Slippery]

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.

Preview with Lynx! Also try loading in your regular browser with style sheets turned off to ensure that non-CSS browsers don't get horrid color schemes or illegible fonts or something.