Slashdot Mirror
Australia Orders Olympic Web Site Accessible to Blind
Julian Assange writes "An article in The Age reports that the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission has ordered the Sydney 2000 Olympics organisers (SOCOG) to use ALT tags on all images and image map links on its web site. IBM who was contracted to develop the site, claims it needs a cool $2 million and a year to retrofit ALT tags to the entire site, including real-time score pages. But Simon Moran of the Public Access Internet Advocacy Centre says the modifications would cost only between $30,000 and $40,000 to implement. It goes without saying that changes would have cost $0 if IBM had correctly used ALT tags the first time around."
As a side note, there are ALT tags, but not very desciptive ones. They did put them in, just not as descriptive as needed for blind access.
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
Even the samurai
have teddy bears,
and even the teddy bears
get drunk
Why do you use "Australia" like all of us down under are responsible for IBMs bad?
We aren't **that** much of a back water, some us did listen to users who surfed without images back in the mid 90's...
marty
"I can't buy want I want because it's free. Can't be what they want because I'm me." -Corduroy, Pearl Jam
AFAIK, the ALT tags were not a part of there initial contract. This gives them the right to demand money for their extra services. Secondly, you must take into account of all the QA work involved in having usable ALT tags. This alone would cost MUCH more than the $30,000 to $40,000 that 'Simon Moran of the Public Access Internet Advocacy Centre' says it should. Think of ALT tags like browsing a completely multimedia site using lynx. Now take away the capability to easily skim over the links that don't interest you. Creating an entire site with useable ALT tags is a PITA. IBMs demands aren't that ludicrous when you take into account the reality behide it.
First and foremost IBM built the site for FREE!
Second, everyone thinks it is easy to change the tags, but a company like IBM is going to actually put the site through a dev life cycle wich involves extensive testing.
At this stage in the game, it is not unreasonable of them to ask for financial incentives.
Holy s-, it's Jesus!
it really depends on how detailed a description you want to give of each picture. do you say "this is a picture of [person's name] skiing" or "(picture of [person's name] skiing. she's at blah blah blah altitude, going at blah blah blah mph, blah blah blah"?
do you try to make it so that someone using lynx wouldn't be able to tell there was a picture there, or do you try hard not to hide the fact that there was an image there? how do you make sure that your goal was accomplished using each of the html-to-speech programs available?
--
The shareholder is always right.
I believe they employ T.V. Raman author of Emacsspeak.
/mill
This isn't a problem with IBM, but rather the "webdesigners" they employ or hired to do this for them. Can't expect pissants like that to do anything right.
You know, IBM wouldn't be having this problem now if they had checked all the code with CSE HTML Validator first... It bitches every time I forget to put alt=" " on my spacer .gifs (hey, it works and it gets the point across...) Not to mention the large number of HTML parsers on the web that will check your site for you... I can't believe IBM doesn't have an HTML parser that would complain about the pages not being HTML 4.01 compliant... were they designing for version 3.0 of the spec like I used to or what? I mean, come on... SOMEONE should have known better. I'm gussing IBM was given the responsibility of handling the tech stuff, and the Olympic Committee was inclined to trust them... they're only one of the largest computer companies in the entire world with tons of experience...
Who said anything about "by hand." I use Perl and CGI.pm to output pages all the time, whether they be dynamically generated or just run from a job to create a "static" page. :)
It also forces you to structure the table correctly so you don't miss any end tags or nest them wrong.
Example...
print table(TR(td("1"),td("2")));
btw, you *are* using tables to display tabular data and not for element positioning, right?! ;-)
Where is the sense of responsibility gone these days? No more "Oh, I messed up. Let me fix that for you". Hell, even HTML for Dummies advocates the use of ALT tags (No, I do not use them, shame on Joe). IBM is certainly, totally, unquestionably responsible. They expect a bunch of buerocrats to know what the hell and ALT tag is? What it is to be used for?
IBM, you messed up. Time to take responsibility for your own actions
tinfoilmedia
Yes, Millward Brown are a company in Creamorne, Sydney (for you locals). They do a whole lot of information based stuff, such as surveys and analytical data.
This seems to be standard practice with contractors. Mention a reasonable small sounding amount of time to do something, but make sure it is sufficiently too long to be useful. It doesn't work very well that often, unless its something really trivial, and frequently results in the organisation responsible losing the contract.
For those who care, CAST.org has a neat tool called Bobby which can analyse web pages and report their 'readability' for the visually impared.
Please head on to http://www.cast.org/bobby/
type in http://www.olympics.com/eng/home.html and send the request for processing.
Interesting to note that, at this stage, Bobby does not report any automatically detected Priority-1 errors. But thats just for this specific page.
CSS2 "implements" many things for disabled people. Mozilla just need to implements them.
As we all know, this is not the first big mistake made by IBM. Their retraction from retail didn't just hurt them in sales, it made them seem xenophobic. By the looks of this tactic, Big Blue is a little paranoid of the general populace.
Another big folly is their Java-powered Point of Service (to which the acronym is, hilariously, POS). I have firsthand knowledge, since CompUSA contracted IBM to replace the AIX terminals with something glitzy that would have flashing ads on the screen for the customers to see. The registers lag often, and on credit cards used often, these terminals outright refuse to let the cashier manually authorize the transaction.
Once again, Big Blue bites the Big one.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Total guesses at answers (but serious ones)
a) The site isn't a simple hierarchy of pages which can just be done one at a time, but is database driven, and there's no provision for the design of the database to be augmented with this new feature.
b) They only deal in years and millions, they are unable to charge less or make it quicker.
Either way makes IBM look bad in my eyes.
However, if the original requirements document did _not_ include the need for or capability to support ALT tags, then IBM are the teflon men. Otherwise, they should be standing in the dock, and doing the whole thing _tomorrow_ for _free_.
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
If you are making a site with just absic info, then yes, you are stupid if you cant make it cross browser.
However, working for an iteractive media development company, we get requests to do things such as ridiculous DHTML events, which i do admit are cool and all but, do not work for all browsers. Especially when you have such diverse implementations of DHTML as Ntscape and IE do.
We are no longer in the age of the internet being a text based doo-dah. The internet is now also a form of entertainment (still a carrier of information too as such is the TV).
Yes, and saying something like "Title Image" or
:)
"title.gif 500x50 23kilobytes" in an ALT tag doesn't cut it.
Y'hear that, IBM!?
Shit, I'd do it for $10,000 and an O of some fine green. ;)
Perl solves EVERYTHING!!!
What if Firestone's "fix" for their tire recall was for owners of the defective tires to buy new ones?
it's just not that easy. the alt tags, and all accessibility stuff need to be in multiple languages. it is not as easy as going through and adding *an* alt tag to each image. nor would it have been as easy as adding *an* alt tag to each image as the site was constructed.
..and that might just cost the $2 million they quoted!
;)
How can they possibly justify the $2 million figure? What do they pay their web developers, and where do I sign up?
Important info:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
http://www.peakoil.net
Should have run it through lynx as it was being built to see if they were missing anything fundamental...
--
Isn't this similar to the classaction suit that was (or is being) brought against AOL.
Maybe the suit is only in the proposal stages...
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Hello Moderators! can you say flamebait?
I'm sorry, but I fail to see how it could take a whole year to add a few alt tags to a web site. I mean, who the hell are they getting to do it? A blind chimpanzee?
No matter how big the site is, it can't take a f'n YEAR to do. I can't fathom how it would take more than a year to design an entire site.
This time estimate was probably just an effort by IBM to get the authorities to say "ahh fuck it, if it'll take them that long then we'll have to let it slide."
I hope they don't get away with it.
how does that work?
oh, i know...those pin things u press your face or hand into and it leaves the image, also allows for brail usage...
Disclaimer: This was not ment to be offensive to anyone.
No we are talking about people with vision problems -- being classified as legally blind does not mean you can't see at all. Think outside of your box for once.
Many Australian developers are very well aware of ALT tags and their importance. I would guess that there is just as great a percentage of American developers not using ALT tags as Australian developers doing the same. Recent similar legal issues have shown that AOL have been careless with regard to accessibility issues also. Incidentally, I would be interested to know if the IBM developers were Americans or Australians.
I do not see the relevance of your comment: "But I don't think Australia is off the hook--they apparently didn't think of it either."
IBM were contracted here as the experts/consultants. It is up to them to use ALT tags and explain their inclusion to the client. When you commission the construction of a cabinet, you can hardly be expected to insist that the maker uses specific glues, timber, joins, etc. The cabinet maker should make these decisions (and explain them if necessary) themselves, and any maker taking the easy road deserves a poor reputation.
I completely agree that IBM should be forced to accept the costs of these fixes. Hopefully it will teach developers world-wide that accessibility is not something to be taken lightly.
I encourage every Web site developer who reads this comment to visit evolt.org , and join our list for Web developers. Many of our members quickly learn the importance of the ALT tag, usability issues, etc.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
is release yet another browser that will have an AI engine built into it that would recognize the context and the picture in any gif or a jpg image file and would then use more AI to generate a meaningfull sentence stating the purpose of the picture and its context + all the extra info needed for the blind people, and the browser should be navigated by voice. Now that is a work for a year and more (image recognition has being in development for the past three decades, human speech recognition for the past four decades.)
You can't handle the truth.
Were talking about *people* here.
The intent of ALT tags is to alow alternate methods of accessing the data to people who can not get information from the graphics for some reason (can't see them, can't load them, can't decode them...)
benifits of keeping webpages under simple standards (and using cgi instead of frames etc)
1) Small time to download for poor bastards still wtihout cable modems
2) Accessable to those with disabilities (handicap programs have better ideas what to speak out or what to enlarge etc)
3) People on public terminals can view it (no plug ins)
4) People on very simple devices can view it (ie linx, mobile phone internet)
5) Easy to print
6) Easy to bookmark exact state
But no, pointy hair boss wants spinning logo and welcome midi music with flash intro that gives it that sorta look but adds nothing useful)
(in the case of Burgandy Rum their flash menu made it impossible to tell what the heck was going on, hopefully fixed it now)
Simple test, give people this option on splash page
1) High bandwidth, flash frames version
2) Simple html
and see which one gets chosen more.
It's turtles all the way down.
I can tell you, two weeks, I wrote one, it worked, not a big deal, and I am not even that bright.
Got 508?
Get the solution.
http://www.ssbtechnologies.com/olympic s.html.
It is the report generated by our spider running through the Olympic site, to a depth of one, since they are using frames this is essentially the flash page. As you can see they fail to do some pretty basic, and obvious things, that can make a serious difference between a site people can use and a site that is useless. Titling your frames, not to difficult.
Hope this helps, if anyone has anymore questions shoot me an email, I am happy to chat about this stuff.
Got 508?
Get the solution.
HTML 4.1, the most recent standard, makes the ALT tag a requirement. The HTML validators at W3C won't let you get away with not using ALT tags. They do validate their HTML, right?
I don't know what the US definition of public is, but in Canada and England (and, I would guess any English speaking country) it often means Governmental.
.gov and (possibly) .mil websites would all have to have alt tags... Other websites can say whatever they want, however they want (I believe your 1st amendment protects that right, or is it the 4th?).
:-)
ie: Government facilities are required to accomodate the disabled.
So, in that case,
And no, image maps and shockwave do NOT necessarialy have to go. I believe the ADA would say that the site has to be fully functional for a disabled user; This doesn't mean removing non-disabled extras that don't affect the funcitonality of the site. Otherwise the local town hall wouldn't have any steps. Instead they just add a ramp. Fully functional for the disabled user, and just as functional for the non-disabled.
>And no friggin frames.
That goes whether you are a public institution or not.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I can't for the life of me find a link anywhere, but I vaguely remember something about IBM having a major website design problem with the Atlanta Olympics, 4 years ago.
From memory it had something to do with some of the event logo's wanting to be changed, and it turned out to be a serious and very expensive problem.
Can anyone possibly confirm or deny this?
===
Web site tools (like Front Page) are HORRIBLE at producing pages that can be read by these special browsers and screen readers. I tend to code all of my pages by hand just to make them usable. It's possible to have a visually appealing site and still make it usable in text-only mode without having to have an entirely separate "text only" track through the site.
I think this is "a good thing" personally. Force people to think about what HTML is really for, structuring the document, move style to stylesheets where they belong, and stop just making up a page and if it looks good in IE, publish it...
What you are saying is that if I contract with a building firm for a new house, unless I specify in the contract the house doesn't have to comply with the building code for my area of residence?
I'd like to think that the wires will comply with electrical code whether or not I put it in writing, and that the plumbing will meet the plumbing code whether I put it in writing or not.
Design firms are responsible for finding and understanding applicable law. This is usually known by the name 'due diligence' and is not an incredibly new concept.
This is the exact same situation, not only is the ALT tag reccomended by the standard, its quite likely that making the web site accessible to non-sighted people is the law in Australia (otherwise there would be no lawsuit).
Given the presentation that IBM makes of its solutions (being professional) I think that they deserve to lose money on this one. If IBM had intentionally made the sight viewable by IE only, there would be screaming from virtually everyone at slashdot. Systemically overlooking people with eye problems is something that should never happen from a 'professional' web-designer.
Federal law requires that all websites USED BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT (that is to say, those created by government agencies and those intended for use by customers of companies who are government suppliers or contractors) must support access for the disabled. The law does not apply to private-sector websites with no connection to the government - nor, IMHO, does the government possess the ability to create a law that would, any more than they can require me to hire a sign-language interpretter if I want to stand on a soapbox in a public park and air my views. Such a requirement would have a chilling affect on the freedom of speach - placing a monetary cost on speach, and thus a potential barrier to expression - which I believe the court would find un-Constitutional.
Regarding IBM and the Olympics: When I was at IBM (until last month, I worked in a division closely connected with the 'Interactive Design' group that does these high-profile websites), accessibility was raised as an issue on a couple of projects, and an effort was made to make all of the designers aware that this was something that needed to be done. Though I don't know that it was ever handed down from on high, the general impression was that handicap accessibility for major websites was Policy. I'd say that someone really screwed the pooch on this one. However, if it wasn't specifically listed as a customer requirement in the Statement of Work, then it's legit to classify it as a DCR and put a pricetag on it.
-SM-I see some point here: It's easy to put ALT tags everywhere, but it fairly complex to get the information what is on the pictures.
...
... this is not worth 2 million and certainly takes not a year of development :-)
What do we have: pictures with something on it that need to be described. Where do we get this informatinon? Form the filename? No.
From a database? Yes - If they have the information at all
Whatever
3 jobs back (oooh, 1998-ish) every friday afternoon at 4:30 I and some mates at work would down tools and have a "web treasure-hunt". Someone not playing would shout out an off-the-wall topic which we would all have to search for, and the race was on. Almost always it was for images.
I almost always won and I used Lynx. I only popped open a graphical browser as a last resort.
Since then I met my "blind" girlfriend who is consistantly faster than me in finding information on the Web. (she uses lynx too).
The Lotus Elise doesn't have carpets or decorative fittings. That's the "sporty" way. Lynx is the same. And it's not necessarily to do with being blind or not.
Phil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Did anyone see the ABC's[1] satire The Games tonight, where Games Management Head of Administration, John Clarke, had to re-launch the Games website! These guys are right on the money when it comes to their material. Indeed, about a month ago, the satire made a point of possible delays at Sydney Airport, and within 24 hours there was a power blackout at the airport, with huge delays!
Where do their writers come from, and what do they think this week's lottery numbers are?
If you get a chance and you like satire, don't miss it, ABC[1], Monday 8pm, with repeats on now at 6pm M-F until the real Games start. But please, remember that it is a comedy, not a documentary!
[1] Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Hmmm. Does this mean that any little web site in Australia comes under this judgement? I have a small site on my (permanently online) computer at home, am I likely to have action taken against me if I don't have ALT tags everywhere on it? (I do have them, btw).
URL withheld so I don't get slashdotted, of course.
_______________________________________
Is that an African or European swallow?
To use your example: After the house is down, you walk through and notice that the doorknobs are not made of solid gold like you wanted. Can you go to the architect and say, "Well, that should have been included."? Of course not. Doorknobs are expected; solid gold ones are not.
ALT text isn't a gold doorknob, it is THE doorknob, at least for some people. ALT text can be used by people to decide whether to view the graphics, and so its absence effectively bars access to a major part of the site. ALT text is not just for blind people, its also for people who use graphical browsers who don't load images (perhaps because they're at the end of a slow link and are paying for access per minute), and for those using non-graphical browsers. Sensibly written ALT text allows those people to think "Hmm, I think I'll take a look at that picture", while not having to load all the other ones.
The sensible thing for SOCOG would have been to include in their contract that the site validate to either the HTML 4.01 strict or transitional DTDs. This would have ensured ALT text, plus a whole host of other benefits.
Its so easy to verify compliance with this requirement - just run the site through a validator! Any smart organisation making a contract with a web design company should make this a requirement.
They keep saying on TV that it's "our Olympics" when it's nothing of the sort - they belong to Sydney and we don't want to have anything to do with them.
Sven
Perth
--
Harsh But Fair: you know it makes sense
harshbutfair: you know it makes sense
www.harshbutfair.org
I assume the article is refering to $2 million australian dollars, which equates to $1.3 million US dollars.
Still way too much, but at least it's in context now
-----------------------
This doesn't sound too hard.
sup
But Simon Moran of the Public Access Internet Advocacy Centre says the modifications would cost only between $30,000 and $40,000 to implement.
IBM should give $40,000 to Simon Moran, and let him do it.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
I assume that because The Age is an Australian site, they're using Australian dollars. So it's a little misleading of /. to quote the figures as straight dollars on the front page (everyone will assume it's US$).
$2,000,000 Australian is "only" $1,143,600 US.
A few facts that seem to have been missed as the news story went around the world (from an Australian):
1) SOCOG were notified of this problem and were asked to fix the site 14 months ago, the entire site could ahve been changed by one person in less than that time.
2) The Australian Disability Discrimination Act applys to everything (workplaces shopping centers etc.) and everywhere (except in a few extreme circumstances), and given how easy it is to change the website i think it should apply to them.
3) SOCOG has been ordered to change the site by the olympics, or damages can be brought against them in a civil action. Which have the potential to be a huge amount, this has not happened yet and SOCOG may still fix the site in time.
For point 3 i feel they have bugger all chance of completing it in time now however as they were informed 14 months ago, the courts will have little to no sympathy if a civil suit is brought against them.
So either Socog will have to pay an enourmas amount to have it fixed in time, political forces will influence the 'independant' judicary and get them off the hook, SOCOG will have to pay a huge amount in damages or SOCOG will continue to appeal until the other party runs out of money if a civil suit is brought against them. Then again something i haven't thought of may also happen.
Essentialy i don't think the site will change in time but it is the precident which is being set that matters. That is it doesn't matter who you are the law applies to all and all people deserve equal treatment and access in all areas of life.
The subject says it all; there is no time to make any changes, no matter who orders them.
If it will take them $2 million and a year to do this, then they must have made grave errors in designing the site. To me, it's akin to asking a mechanic to change all the tires on your car, and he says it will cost $2 million and take a year. Well, then he's not a very good mechanic, and maybe you ought to take your business elsewhere.
Except that the Olympic comittee is stuck with IBM.
--
Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
find /home/olympomatic -name ?tm? -exec addalt.pl {} \;
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
If the customer had been smarter, they would have specified HTML 4.01 compliance as a condition of acceptance of the deliverable. The use of the alt attribute for the img element is required by the HTML 4.01 Recommendation
Adding ALT tags is one thing, but how do you support ALT tags for multiple languages? That would imply multiple character sets, too.
My guess is they have parallel pages using different character sets and languages? (I've not yet had a chance to look at the site, so please don't flame me if I've missed something obvious.)
Past experience with multinational sites, I've had to select a language before entering, and then I'd see appropriate text for that language on the site. I'd expect to see something similar here.
The difference between <B> and <STRONG> is that the former suggests that the text it surrounds should be displayed in a boldfaced font on the screen, while the latter suggests that the surrounded text is supposed to be emphasized because it stands out from the rest of the text in the sentence. You still might be wondering exactly what the difference is.
In many situations, rendering something in boldface does not necessarily mean that you want the text to be strongly emphasized by somebody who's reading it aloud. Take, for example, section or table headings. You might make those boldface to draw visual attention to them, but that does not mean that you intend to add any sort of verbal "stressing" to those words.
The bottom line is that there is a difference between putting something in boldface for the purpose of making it stand out visually, and putting something in bold face to suggest that the text should be verbally and/or logically emphasized when reading, speaking or interpreting the text. If you want to design "blind-friendly" Web pages, use <B> for the former and <STRONG> for the latter. It makes a difference for many (most?) text-to-speech translation systems.
--
--
The New World Order is upon us, and it's about damned time.
Better still, how long did this case wait before it was tried in the judicial system?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
That's a cool site. Like most lints, it's more noise than anything. Of course, I checked slashdot.org--it didn't do as well as olympics.com.
It would be easier if everything was script generated.
You just insert the graphic name instead of image.
Every web database and script eventually generates html.
* "Uncle this droid is malfunctioning" -- Luke Skywalker
The site isnt too good anyhow. I went to order some tickets, and not all events could be ordered online. I still had to ring up for a phone operator, and listen to 4 pre-recorded msgs till I could order. Even if the ALT tages are added, the site still wont do much!
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
Why, thank you for volunteering to spend a few hours a week helping a visually impaired individual to surf the web. Never mind having to stomp on their dignity by forcing them to ask for help.
If you could think a bit out of the box for more than 6 seconds, you might realize that there are more ways to interface with a computer than just a monitor. Pray to whatever deity you worship (God, Allah, Technology....) that you never have to know what it's like to not be able to see.
Does anyone have any idea how many adaptive technologies have been produced/perfected to help disabled users, and then applied back to the general public? Think the last time you called telephone information? Voice Recognition. Last time you called for your bank balance? Voice synthesis. Most open-cavity surgeries? Telescopic lenses for visually impaired. 5 years ago OCR systems for the Visually Impaired were more accurate and performed better than OCR for PCs. The list goes on and on. The fact remains that accommodations for disabled individuals help those individuals become contributing members of society (and no longer a tax-drain) and they improve our lives in ways that we never would have thought of.
Be thankful for what you have today. Always remember tomorrow you could be on the other side.
try clicking on HISTORY it actually brings you to ABOUT THE GAMES
:o)
IT seams that the imagemap for the frontpage is off as someone forgot about history
It would have been nice to see a bit more support for alternative browsing methods (e.g. is there an official WAP site? Latest sports results are just the sort of thing that i'd like on my phone), but it's a bit late telling IBM to change their site a fortnight before the games start ...
If you were "australian" you would spell it with an "A". QED you Ain't !
They were the ones who bought the damn thing in the first place
Nah, The Premier purchased them, along with with his high priced mates, we are simply paying
Allan, 1000M from an Olympic event, and hating it
A large company like IBM SHOULD cater for the laws of Australia when designing a website for the Australian Olympics though surely? As a libertarian, you should understand the need for certain laws to protect people's rights, or are disabled people not worth it in your opinion? I suspect that some people hide behind the mantle of "libertarian" when they actually mean "screw you, I'm busy seeking self-gratification while trampling over everyone else."
Such as popup windows that have all their text embedded in jpeg images, no plain text at all!
Australian? Join EFA
I've also found that at least internally, IBM's web solutions tend to be very overpriced. For a while I worked in their global planning division and was tasked with the job of hunting down groups using non-sanctioned solutions and getting them to move over to the official stuff. Which would run you only three grand for 60 megabytes of web content and IGS would do all the work of getting the content up to the server. A definite win in flexibility and function over the OS/2 or Linux boxes that were being used before uh huh (sarcasm.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I dispute that. Your yourself had to add a caveat. You can't use frames, image maps or style sheets. Tables are a lottery.
Probably implies you never actually tried. I am working on these issues at the moment, and you didn't convince me.
That maybe was the idea behind HTML at the start, but where have you been? What websites do you look at?! Every tag, every attribute, is co-erced and poluted to acheive layout effects by almost every site out there.
It's a noble aim to build a site that everyone can see, and also includes all the whizzy stuff that people on high-end machines expect to see.. but I simply disagree that it's easy.
IBM isn't doing the web sites for the Olympics after Sydney, so they no longer have any reason to play nice with these people. They can take the attitude "it wasn't in the contract", and not have to worry about who they piss off. I bet if they were still doing the Olympics, you would have never heard of this story.
Does anyone else have a hard time believign that it cost cost anywhere near either $30,000 to $40,000 up to $2 million to put in ATL tags. I figure that it would cost about $4,000 to pay a bunch of college kids $10 an hour, free coffee, and pizza, to put in those tags. That is unless of course a commitee must be set up first to find the most non-offensive PC terms to use with their ALT tags.
boy case opined:
Let's go back and look at the article.
What he have here is the finding that SOCOG's web sight breached one of the law's of Australia. Hence, IBM, as part of due diligence in their bid for designing the site, should have taken accessibility into consideration. Hence, my opinion that the retrofit to make the site comply with the law should come out of IBM's pocket.
Web designers are responsible for knowing the laws that impact their craft, just as plumbers and electricians are responsible for knowing building regulations.
Sure, and while we're at it, let's just lock them up in institutions so we don't have to look at them. After all they are just dumb blind people, and a drain on society anyway.
My wife is visually impaired. Attitudes like this are what she ran into in School. Because she couldn't see well, people were more interested in taking pity than taking action. She is consistently one of the most intelligent people I have met, but because she uses a guide dog, when we meet people, they talk to her like a child. They start speaking slowly, etc. She's not asking for special treatment, she's asking for the ability to interact with the web as anyone. The up side is that the time taken to make a web site accessible for visually impaired users also makes a site more usable by search-engines/intelligent agents, WAP phones, and people who don't like the high-graphics pages...
- Dan
I'm a rather boggled by this:
:)
- multi-million dollar contract for the one of the largest global sporting events
- IBM will have tremendous public exposure via their site
- IBM must certainly expect this to be an advertisment for their own services, to help land future fat contracts
- yet they forget the ALT tag? An ancient tag so obvious, so simple, that even *I* know to use it in my little "hobby" website?
Does IBM have any blind employees in their company? Anywhere? In the world? Has anyone on their design team ever known a severely sight-impaired person? Ever? In their life?
Hello! McFly!
If they can be that dense and still succeed as a huge multi-national company, it gives me hope that my plans for world domination will one day come to fruition
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
I'd like to read some of them.
"This is a graph showing how many of each medal each country has won. Sorry, its generated dynamically, so we can't actually describe it."
"This is a picture of an athlete, however, your ISP uses a stealth cacheing proxy, so when this page renders, it will be the wrong picture."
"This is a person smiling, we don't know who."
"Here's a picture of the entire corp of prostitutes booked a year in advance for the execs and bigwigs visiting the Olypics. Please use a "touchy-feely" mouse for full detail."
Seriously, this is stupid. And stupider, is a non-technical "activist" deciding how much it "should" cost. Next we'll have some government savage telling us how much is "too much" to pay for M$ Office.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I bet we already have html parsers in . And i bet there are a lot
of code jockeys reading this.
So why not create a meta
site which is a mirror of the original site, but
is more accessible to the blind ? (by which
i am implying you can do *more* than just
alt tags). Ofcourse, I realise the hard part is
creating the correct alt tags -- this is probably
best handled manually (A group of volunteers
who sit and tag the images).
If somone writes the code, i volunteer to spend
8 hours a week adding alt tags (i do need a bit
of training in the correct way of describing the
image, ofcourse).
The reason i am not doing it myself ? do not know
a good html parser and have no computer at home
(will change soon).
Once you do, contact me at "syam\@mail.com" which
is ofcourse the valid perl string way of my email
address (back/ and quotes are not a part of my
email address, if you do not get what i mean).
mays
this would cost quite a bit... each picture would have to be viewed and described by someone knowledgable, and then the tags would have to be added.
Amazing magic tricks
How is it that Australia is just finding out NOW that ALT tags aren't in use? Why didn't they insist that it be in the contract to begin with? I agree that IBM should fix the pages and I further think it should be done for free (it's just plain poor engineering to leave the tags out). But I don't think Australia is off the hook--they apparently didn't think of it either.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
please explain the purpose behind this demand? How exactly does an ALT tag help Human rights and Equal opportunities? Should they do this on pr0n sites too? I'm confused? If you're blind does it really matter?
Sig it.
IBM should know better than this. For God's sake, all they had to do was read the standards. My own site has been guilty of the same crime. But changing ALT tags, while time-consuming is a chore at best. It should have been planned for and done in the first place. We are doing so for any new sites we do.
Inclusiveness, that should have been their motto.
I wonder what they would have done with the site for the Special Olympics???
sic transit biscuitus
How bout they just contract with a few of us for a couple hundred thousand each and we'll do it? We'll save them money and make some easy cash, sounds perfect...
Note from the article that "Mr Maguire was previously successful in forcing SOCOG to print its original ticket order book in braille.". While not excusing IBM's web developers for ignoring accessibility (about which more below), it seems that SOCOG also has some responsibility.
How many highly-visible organizations have to get dinged for failing to provide accessibility before they all learn the lesson?
Back to IBM, a brief look at the source for the site in question leaves the impression of severe gimmickry and glitter. Frames and JavaScript (to force you to use frames) abound! Perhaps if they had taken a more straightforward implementation strategy, maintaining the site wouldn't be so difficule?
Incidentally, anybody know who "Millward Brown Interactive" is? Their copyright is in some of the JavaScript.
I've worked with a couple of people who were involved on the Project for the Olympics @ syndey. These were not what you would exactly call rocket-scientists. More like brain surgeons( ala Sean from survivor. Sheesh! )
None of these monkeys had even a remote idea what kind of standards the pages were to be coded against. It is not so much the use of technologies that are not supported on each platform, as to not a clue as to what HTML is for.
Trust me, it will take about a million dollars to do it if IBM is involoved. Probably two guys, 8 hours , with Emacs could get the job done. Grrrr
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
If you would bother to look at the site (http://www.olympics.com/eng/), you would see a basic flaw in most of the posts here. For some reason people are assuming that IBM didn't use any ALT tags on the images. That would obviously be moronic. But that's not the case. Most of the images on the site do use ALT tags.
Not that there are no problem there though. For a pointless breaking of the site for blind users, check out the "Sports" page off the front page. The popup javascript thingie to select a sport is completely worthless, and yes, the imagemap doesn't have any ALT tags. Why didn't they just do a straight HTML page?
It looks like all of the pictures on the main Olympics page already have alt tags (except 2 of the non-IBM ads) There also seems to be a mistake in an alt-tag on the tickets page. The alt-tag gives a different number for tickets than the image (17 72 79 instead of 13 72 79)
Here is the pseudo code to add alt tags to the site.
pick your own language.
for each file in site
open file
for each line in file
search for "<img src "
find next ">"
replace ">" with "alt='image'>"
next
close file
next
I wonder if I can bill IBM?
* "Uncle this droid is malfunctioning" -- Luke Skywalker
I think the issue is more complicated than just sticking a bunch of img attributes in a bunch of tags. I'm not a big fan of IBM's work (did anybody try navigating the Wimbldon site or get scores?), but the issue is not as clear as what's being discussed here.
Can somebody clear this up? The key might be in this quote from the article. "SOCOG will also have to provide access to the Index of Sports for the schedule page and access to the results tables to be featured during the Games." I could not figure out what this meant, since it looks like people already had easy access to this information.
That's gonna run you $4 million plus labor.
I wonder if the people from IBM who create the web site are related to my auto mechanic?
Accessibility is tough, but Lynx friendliness takes you a long way there in a simple, straightforward manner.
Now, I'll admit that $2 million and a year does seem absurd. And somebody should be blamed for overlooking something so obvious during the specification stage, though it's not clear to me it should necessarily be IBM. But don't assume "Oh, this is an easy thing to fix" if you've never had to manage a site of this size and complexity.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Many of the flashy sites are more involved with getting the glitz seen, then doing the right thing (getting information out to all the people.)
Check http://www.cast.org if you haven't already for some general guidelines on HTML and accessability (beyond the ALT and LONGDESC tags)
In addition, while I strenuously support the widespread accessibility of web sites by the blind, I think any law, Australian or otherwise, that requires sites to structure their content politely is a bad law -- because I think that laws should be the same for the big and little guys; if the IOC should be sued for this, then so should tastynipple.com, as well as my personal website, and I think that making my website accessible to the blind should be a personal and voluntary decision by me.
I can see an excellent argument that the IOC, as a business, should have to provide accessibility (as businesses do) but I shouldn't have to (as my home doesn't), but I still don't buy it. Slashdot is definitely a business site, and I'm very glad that they're blind-friendly, but I honestly don't think that they should be legally obligated to be so, because, no matter how good and just the law, it represents yet another legal pocketknife hacking away at the fundamental principles ("My machine? My rules.") that made the net a win in the first place.
Ob-IP-Rant: Of course, this would all be easier if it were legal to set up a blind-friendly site that served olympics.com's content... when's that Sealand thing going up?
This is all really basic stuff, Usability 101, and there's no excuse for getting it wrong on a really high-profile site. Heck, they ought to have a full-time usability expert for a site like that!
Danny
I have written over 900 book reviews
If the the request was in the contract they they should not pay a dime but if they are asking to put something in later then I say charge them.
You are not HTML 4 compliant if you don't use alt tags
--
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Very interesting quote... if I start quoting out my web design like this, can I really get $2m for some ALT tags?
A web design quote might look like this:
META tags = $540,000
IMG ALT tags = $2,000,000
A HREF tags = $45,000,000
TITLE tags = $30,000 per page
hmmm.. somebody's getting ripped off.
--cr@ckwhore
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
It goes without saying that changes would have cost $0 if IBM had correctly used ALT tags the first time around.
Well it should go without saying, because that is a completely false statement. It would cost a fortune to design a site that large with for blind accessibility--regardless of when you did it. It certainly would have been much cheaper to do it from the get-go, but it most definately would not have been no cost.
-k
I actually work for gool old Big Blue, and thie would seem to be a bit of an...oversight.
Perhaps I could shed some light on factors which may have preoccupied the time of the website people:
The summer Olympics is basically a $2-3 Billion dollar company, started from nothing, scaling to a user base of 100,000 on-site, and millions on-line, in a timespan of something like 5-7 years. AND the city's Olympic committee has to budget for the ENTIRE OLYMPICS up-front. Guess what the last thing they budget for is?? I/T. At last count, I believe the SLC games had budgeted something like $20M for all technology at the games. Guess who foots the bill to make everything work. IBM. They also get to pay tens of millions to jsut be a sponsor. The costs at the Nagano gamed were ASTRONOMICAL, and IBM had it's stock price impacted...quite significantly, IIRC, even as high as $25/share (??).
$20M seem high? For that the Olympics gets:
-Data systems capable of handling a 1TB Database! (that's the figure given to me the the IBM VP of Olympic Technology...remember, every stat of every game for every player from every nation...etc.)
-Web servers capable of handling what are consistantly the highest trafficked websites in history. They are taking user requests, formatting a SQL call, searching through the monster database, returning restuts, formatting them, merging them with a Domino template, and then displaying them to over 100,000 users a minute with reasonable response time (4 seconds??). When EDS did the World cup, they got something like 20+ second response time, and that's just for one sport.
-Lots of RS/6000 SP/2 node to handle the traffic, dynamically distributed amond the 3 internationally based data centers.
Probably the SP/2 nodes by themselves are more than $20M.
Plus every athlete gets their own site/e-mail, etc.... the list keeps going on and on...
I guess I could see how they could forget about features that aren't supported on most websites...
While there is a lot more to accessibility than a simple ALT-attribute, the ALT-attribute is required by HTML4, and if you hire someone and they give you code that doesn't validate, then I think you are in your full right to say that "the product you delivered doesn't work, fix it".
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Of course from a web-geek's frame of mind ALT tags should have been included from the beginning. Don't make the mistake of believing IBM never thought about it either. Most of the people shouting "IBM should have known better!" here have obviously never dealt with IBM directly as a solution provider.
If you want a great, world-class solution, they'll be happy to build it for you, for a price. If on the other hand, you want the shoddiest, most god-awful, cheapest hunk of crap ever seen, they'll also smile quite happily, build it for you, and cash your cheque just as fast.
IBM will bend over backwards to give a client what they want... even if that means building absolute garbage. We have problems with this all the time where a single department has contracted a solution based on their own limited understanding of their needs, and we find a closed solution that has to be completely replaced.
With a little up-front work, we always find the IBM'ers are very receptive to doing things the right way, as long as that's what you want to pay for.
"So on one hand, honey is an amazingly sophisticated and efficient food source. On the other hand it's bee backwash."
And yes, it was moronic not to be using tags in the first place.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Netscape Internet Explorer AOL (if you know someone with a client) Mozilla/Netscape 6.0 PR2 Lynx
These are the most browsers out there. I know there are others lik Konquerer, Galeon and Nautilus..but these should be the minimum. I personally think WAP phones aren't that popular, yet, and I don't think they will. What's going to be a BIG hit is Crusoe based wireless web pads. Thye enable you to use all of the plugins and everything you have on a PC, in a nice small package....when they get here. Other things I think that will work great are Linux palm devices. They allow you to run X and a decent web browser (ok, you may have to rewrite one, but the capability is there...can we say Galeon?).
Gorkman
Netscape, Internet Explorer, Mozilla/Netscape 6.0 PR2, and Lynx.
Gorkman
If they really felt that way, they should have researched what was required of them, and then asked for it in their contract with IBM. Further, I'm sure IBM didn't design the site in a vacuum. The Aussies must have looked at it multiple times, with tests, before signoff. If they missed it during those tests, it obviously wasn't that big a deal for them.
"Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin,