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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
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.
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.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
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
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.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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.
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.
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
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?)