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

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.

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.

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