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."

Comments

2M$ is justified.

[crlf]

Although most people will be bashing IBM for asking for such a wad of cash, you must take into account that something as little as ALT tags come with a big price this late in developement.

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.

Re:2M$ is justified.

[deusx]

Secondly, you must take into account of all the QA work involved in having usable ALT tags.

Not to mention the classification and captioning work that needs to go into writing the copy for the ALT tags to begin with, which must consequently be reviewed line-by-line by a writer. That is, assuming this site was developed like most of those I've worked on.

If it wasn't in the contract to support wide ranges of accessibility to begin with, shame on the client. Basically, IBM could look really good doing it for free. Otherwise....

Re:2M$ is justified.

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Like a water-proof roof for an house, ALT tags are mandatory for a "usable" web site.

Well, that's the rub, isn't it? Does everyone agree that Web sites have to have ALT tags so that they're accessible to the blind? Just reading the reaction on slashdot -- a self-selected technically knowledgable group -- the answer seems to be "no". There are a number of people who question the point of this. (I am not saying they're right; I'm just pointing out that they exist.)

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.

Personally, I don't view accessibility by the blind -- especially for a major international site like the Olympics -- to be the same sort of frill as a gold doorknob. But the question is: What sort of features are expected by nearly everyone when you say "I'll make you a web site"? I think it can argued that accessibility, sadly, is not one of those features.

IBM should be smart enough to do this for free or at some nominal cost, just for the PR. But it's not clear they should be forced to do so.

Re:hmmmm

[jesser]

It takes, say, 20 seconds to right-click an image in your favorite editor and give it a description.

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?

--

Re:Takes a bit more than ALT tags....

[weave]

Just don't ask me to code a complex table by hand and expect it to be done within thirty minutes.

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?! ;-)

CAST's Analysis of the homepage

[simpleguy]

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.

Similar AOL classaction

[tolldog]

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...

Re:Disgusting...

[stx23]

I don't think it's an issue of just not having alt tags, the design seems to favour browsers that render images and no alternative navigation. One example is the world map, it's an image map with no alternative menu in text, which is pretty poor to say the least. Surely someone from IBM showed their designs off to the committee? Shouldn't it have at this point objections were raised? I would guess it would be easier to build a data driven text based site from scratch rather than attempt to modify everything that's already in place.

Two million and a YEAR?

[enneff]

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.

Re:Two million and a YEAR?

[bluGill]

However, if the original requirements document did _not_ include the need for or capability to support ALT tags, then IBM are the teflon

I think the courts are going to say that acess for the blind (and otherwise disabled when the reasonable capability to do so exists) should be obvious, and is already required by current laws. therefore it need not be written in the contract.

If I order a custom car, (the rich can afford to hire a few machinists and engineers to design a car to their exact specifications if they want) and it doesn't come with an engine, courts will agree that a means of propelling the car at highway speeds (safely) are standard in all madern cars, and therefore they need to retrofit something in their to make it go. A strict reading of the contract however will not show an engine.

What IBM should do

[roman_mir]

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.)

Re:Website Accessible to Blind?

[fatphil]

My "registered blind" girlfriend (who can see enough to survive without a white stick or anything) always uses Lynx (in 80x25 text mode on a 21" monitor with her face 8" from the screen.

Therefore she only uses the ALT tags, as there aren't any images, and can't be any images.

However for the truly blind, the web is often "viewed" using a speech synthesiser.
There are also Braille interfaces too, but they are a mechanical add-on, but a speech interface is simply software and a standard soundcard.

Watching her browse, I've learned that "Image 384x240 32K" is a totally useless ALT tag.

Phil

Re:So architects don't have to design to code?

[El Kevbo]

The alt tag is not recommended; it is required.

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?

Did IBM have problems in Atlanta too?

[jesterzog]

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?

===

Takes a bit more than ALT tags....

[weave]

It takes more than just ALT tags to make a site readable to someone using a screen reader. If you doubt that, just fire up trusty old lynx and try to navigate most sites, even if they have ALT tags.

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...

So architects don't have to design to code?

[brokeninside]

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.

Re:Disgusting...

[Masem]

Yes, you can build web sites that are interesting and full of eye-candy, yet still be fully features-compliant such that it will work with all browsers [*] on all platforms, for disabled users, for cel-phones, for text-only display, or whatever other situation that we have yet to envision. It doesn't require a lot of extra work from the start, and is probably easier to develop and maintain. You can still use CSS, Java, JS, Flash, or other plug in features as well. This is the whole point of HTML - the browser, whatever it may be, decides how to render what you wrote, ignoring tags as necessary to make sense for that particular enviornment (e.g. ignoring in text browsers).

99% of broken sites out there can be easily fixed with ALT tags and text menus for image maps. Most other problems stem from JS-only navigation. If you want to add eye candy with images not needed to get the content of the site, ALT="" is quite valid and will not disrupt a page on lynx or other text browsers. There's plenty more easy accessibility tips that you can add, and it's much easier to add them at the start than the end, but even completed web sites can add them easily.

[*] There are browser problems where the HTML rendering is coding completely wrong, unfortunately, and one had to code around it. CSS on IE3 and NS4 are two good examples: it's just broken yet functioning in IE3, and for no good reason, you have to have JS enabled to use CSS in NS4, and your CSS has to be whitespaced just right lest you run into problems.

META Information

[FonkiE]

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.

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 ... this is not worth 2 million and certainly takes not a year of development :-)

The Games

[jamesbromberger]

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

Re:The ADA & IBM Website Accessibility

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

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.

I don't knwo the specific law you're using. If it's the Americans with Disabilities Act, you are contruing its scope too narrowly. The ADA applies to all "places of public accommodation". That's why it can be enforced against, say, private independent schools. (I'm a teacher at one -- trust me on this.) I don't know if a Web site is considered a "place of public accommodation" -- I very much suspect the courts haven't tried this one yet.

Anyway, since the site was for the Australian Olympics, (US) Federal law doesn't really apply...

HTML 4.0

[Jeffrey Baker]

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

Far too late

[Fervent]

This is a classic example of a little too much justice far too late. Who's going to think that IBM can implement ALT-tags site-wide in less than a few weeks?

Better still, how long did this case wait before it was tried in the judicial system?

The IBM Solution

[Greyfox]

Without going and looking, I'd guesstimate that they're using Lotus Domino for the site. The $2 million figure is probably to repair the brain damage in Domino, rather than going through and recoding all the HTML by hand. Domino puts out a fairly flashy (and consistent) web page, but only if you can see it. I've found they tend to be very painful to use in Lynx or non-standard web browsers (Such as IBM's Web Explorer for OS/2.)

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.)

Re:The IBM Solution

[gorilla]

I find domino websites very painful to use in IE or Netscape or other 'standard' browsers.

Re:The IBM Solution

[Skapare]

I use NS 3 (because NS 4 is brain dead) and the site looks fairly decent in NS 3. There is the usual miscalculated table cell problem that most web generators have because they used absolute rather than relative sizes, and assumed the wrong sizes for various objects.

In general dynamically generated web pages are badly done because the programs are intended to be used by artists rather than programmers, and therefore the specs tend to be what artists need. Most web artists come from the print media, and they can't think in terms of different monitor sizes, screen resolutions, fonts, objects, and stuff like that. So the end result is generally bad. You do see pressure to "standardize" to one browser, one screen size, etc. But the IBM Olympics site is definitely better than average with respect to this issue. I remember my first encounter with Domino and it was junk. They've come a long way since then.

As for ALT tags, that's obviously something they missed.

What would you do if a building was constructed that omitted wheelchair ramps, and due to the way it was built will require as much money as the building itself just to add the ramps? I'd say some architects failed.

Re:Multi-browser compatible sites

[Masem]

Frames: Bad NS-ism, and unfortunately now mainstream. There's more than enough problems with frames, the two largest being the lack of bookmarking anything inside a framed site and how you can suddenly switch to an outside site and still be framed in the first site (which can be potental lawsuit material from a case about 2 years ago). Guess what: thanks to tables and SSI, any site 'effect' that can be done in frames can be done without frames. And if done right, it's just as easy to write a site that has both framed and nonframed versions without sacrifice (there *is* a tag that many authors forget).

Image maps: Just add a simple line like at the bottom of any /. page *in addition to* the image map. Also, there are ALT tags for image maps that work the same as normal images - lynx handles them nicely.

Tables: Tables, surprisingly, only work poorly when you specify absolute sizes. Relative size tables work nearly flawlessly across the browser board (including text browsers), as long as you don't try to force the size of the table off the screen by including huge images or whatnot inside them. Most web creatores that complain about tables failing are ones that tend to design for a certain browser size (1024x768) and are agast when the 640x480 results suck. The only recommendation on the size of the window is loosely based on the WinTV size (512x4--) and even that is only tentatively suggested. Wait till 320x240 lcd panels on your toaster are common.

Style-sheets - Browsers that don't understand style sheets will completely ignore style sheets. Newer browsers (IE5, NS4.5+, Moz, Opera4) have no major problems with style sheets, though some are more compliant than others. The killer is IE3, which supports style sheets but so poorly it breaks pages more than helps them as CSS is supposed to do. (as I mentioned NS4.0 has some significant problems with parsing that can be worked around by a careful CSS writer). So generally, as long as you use style sheets as intended, you aren't going to be breaking anything on any browser save for IE3, and most people aren't using that anymore.

Remember, if NS and IE stuck to the W3C specs from Mosaic 0.9 on, most of the problems with the web accessibility today would be gone. And even today, NS and IE want to vary from the specs (above and beyond buggy compatibility), and the browser war has done significant damage to the webspace. But we are slowly recovering, as many many sites realize that content is king over appearence, and many major sites start striving to be fully HTML4.0 compatible.

IBM's last Olympics

[Smack]

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.

It is the law, else, there would be no law suit

[brokeninside]

boy case opined:

It has nothing to do with any laws or codes.

Let's go back and look at the article.

SOCOG was ordered to make changes to its website before the Olympics start after the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission upheld a complaint against the site by a blind man today.

Bruce Maguire lodged the complaint because large parts of the site were inaccessible to blind people.

The commission today ruled in Mr Maguire's favor and ordered SOCOG to make changes to its website before September 15.

It found SOCOG had breached the Disability Discrimination Act and has ordered it to use ALT text on all images and image map links on its site. [my emphasis]

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.

hmmmm

[rnd()]

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.

There must be more to this story

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

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.
--

Enough blame to go around

[joel.neely]

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.

BUT it has ALT tags!

[Smack]

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?

I can see it now...

[GuNgA-DiN]

So? You want META tags now?!?!

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?

Good idea, bad law

[Chops]

Now I know that IBM is a bunch of kneebiters for not taking the semi-simple steps that it would have taken to make the site accesible to the blind and lynx-using among us, and I sincerely sympathize with Mr. Maguire's plight, but... what about jurisdiction? A common complaint on Slashdot (one that I agree with) is that France has no right to tell Yahoo! what to do, the US has no right to tell Norwegians what to do, and in general, that you have no legal recourse if what you downloaded doesn't agree with your local standards, unless the server or poster is violating his, her, or its local law. The Olympics cater to an international audience, obviously, but that doesn't mean they have to obey any Canadian laws about English vs. French content-balancing.

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?

Re:Good idea, bad law

[theonetruekeebler]

Who owns the 2000 Olympics' website? If it is owned by--or subsidized by--the Australian govenment, they certainly do have fair say in how the site's information is presented.

If on the other hand the gubment has no claim to ownership, your argument certainly merits attention.

The gripping hand, though, is that if the site is hosted in Australia, we could hold that its accessibility is beholden to the same laws that govern access to, say, any Australian building, regardless of ownership, that is open to the public. Which raises the question of what will the ALT tags on something like www.porno.com.au, if there is such a site, would look like:

[NIPPLE] [NIPPLE] [NIPPLE] [NIPPLE] [NIPPLE] [BUTT] [NIPPLE] [NIPPLE] [NIPPLE] [NIPPLE] [NIPPLE] [NIPPLE]

Which makes me think that the analogy between being blind and running Lynx is becoming more accurate every day.

--

Usability 101

[danny]

It's not just ALT tags - there are other things wrong with the Olympics site as well. For example, the bogus implementation of frames, making it impossible to link to many pages directly.

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

Re:Disgusting...

[Paulo]

Hey, we are not talking here about redesigning the site for Yet Another Browser that happens to use a completely different implementation of DHTML, DOM, Javascript, etc., We are talking simply about putting ***ALT*** tags in each image, okay? One simple line of text for each graphic they use; how hard is that?

Of course, it's going to be more time-consuming (though even that could be arguable), but my point is that it doesn't present any technical problem; when did ALTs first come out, in HTML 2.0?

HREOC can't make binding rulings

[Goonie]

The commission needs to take its rulings to the Federal Court if they want to get them enforced. At this stage, as the article says, it's not binding.

And yes, it was moronic not to be using tags in the first place.