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Site Review: 2002 Olympics
Andy King writes: "If Olympic Web sites were an event, Salt Lake wouldn't even
take the bronze. Our review reveals some gnarly accessibility
moguls." There's another review of the site which mentions the many accessibility problems that the Sydney Olympics had with its website. The site doesn't appear to work at all with konqueror.
http://www.saltlake2002.com/
It looks fine to me. It's basically MSN/MSNBC affiliated news. It's not much worst than other sites such as CNN, BBC, MSNBC, etc etc.
Is it just me or was this a stupid story to get posted to slashdot anyway?
*yawn*
Hmm...seems the IOC is intent on ensuring that they don't cater to us dweebs. I'm sure they feel can make millions more from TV licensing than they ever would from web content. And they're right.
They're not even making any money off the site AFAIK, unlike some sites that don't work (airline sites mostly) without IE5.5 and a lot of good luck.
IMHO it could be a lot worse, as well as a lot better. Usability nuts seem to forget how businesses actually work (which is to say, barely, on most days).
I run Linux full-time at home on my laptop, and use Windows full-time at work (mostly because Windows Media doesn't run natively in Linux, and Real is not representative under Linux of how it runs in Windows -- and our streaming media clients are the biggest source of support calls). Normally I just expect incompetent web design. By my standards, the SLOC website is not half bad, just wickedly slow.
YMMV...
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
The modern Olympic games are just a friggin' waste of TV time, and just one more thing in human culture that has been taken over, lock, stock and barrel by megacorporations and their sponsorships. Yeah-- like these athletes really got that way by sucking down Big Macs. Riiiiiiight.
The last time the games really mattered was in 1936, when Jesse Owens beat out Hitler's alleged Master Race competitors. It's been all downhill since then. All that's left now is a corporate-sponsored hollow shell. I'm surprised they haven't destroyed the last bastion of tradition and redone the torch to look like a big Bic or Zippo.
Face it, the most Olympic-related fun you can have nowadays is by dusting off your old Commodore 64/Atari/Apple II/what-have-you and loading up the old Epyx "[season] Games" titles.
~Philly
But is it really newsworthy? I mean, how many sites are there out there that have similar problems?
(Hint: lots.)
I think there's a broader problem here.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Argh! I notice the URLs end in ".asp", which means it's running Microsoft stuff! Why is it that practcally every *big* site that uses Microsoft technologies feels compelled to add a whole whack of content that is unsupported by non-IE browsers? (I think I just asked a rhetorical question here.)
... the part that should tell them there are other bowsers out there, and in a world where not everyone has a 1.6 GHz Pentium or an AMD 1800 CPU, half a gig of RAM, 20 GB of hard disk, the latest copy of Windows, and a partial T1 connection to the internet, they should make allowances for people at the lower end of the spectrum ... perhaps text mode only with lynx or w3m.
It appears that when people start developing web sites with MS technologies, a crucial part of their bran turns off
Or is that going too low?
I haven't lost my mind; it's backed up on a CD-R somewhere
The comment criticizing non-explicit links {"How do users tell these are links? How can we tell the difference between black text and black links?"} makes perfect sense in the eyes of those who are worried about code and not visual aesthetics. However, from a visual design perspective, I bloody-well hate explicit links; they pre-empt the intuitiveness/intelligence of the viewer.
This is not to say that I Officially Support the Olympic Site, but rather to say that I find Falken's critique in this area narrowly drawn.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
Is that many people don't have broadband at home yet. Heck, the recent slashdot poll had 19% of slashdotters using dialup. That number has to higher for the Jane Imacs and the Allen Oscar Littles. Now between the Flash, Video (Quicktime and Windows Media?), and Actobat files this has got to be a bandwith hungry sight. Unless they feel most people will be viewing this at home they are probably shutting people out.
Sean.OutaHere()
I can't get that excited about "accessability" issues for what's basically promotion for a TV program.
Yes. And I'd just like to add my pet peeve that happened in the last Olympics: BBC radio's streaming audio was shut down by the IOC because the BBC broadcasts Olympic information in the course of it's news reporting.
Luckily, I also have a pretty good shortwave radio, so I could get my BBC fix from across the atlantic anyway, but it still pissed me off. I like the quality of the stream. Shortwave is unpredictable where I am.
A bit offtopic, but you should have seen the really nasty looks I got from coworkers when I said I was glad Toronto lost their recent bid for the 2008 summer games. Now those IOC crooks won't be draining money from more worthy projects in my country.
Usability issues aside - with the Olympics being, you know, an international event, you'd expect translations of the page in at least the common European languages plus Japanese and a few others, right?
Whoever had the foresight to exclude all languages other than English and French is a complete moron, and stands to further propogate the idea of the self-serving American (i.e.: "everybody should speak English!"). To make matters worse, the French site follows none of the English site's design conventions (perhaps a good thing!) and has the personality of a dehydrated camel - there are no images on the site's content pages, for example.
Also, not to be troll, but honestly, guys... when the top story on the front page is a lambasting of the usability of a website, it's a good thing to provide a link of some sort to the site, ya know?
Of course, that's because they're using javascript to redirect from http://www.saltlake2002.com/ to http://www.saltlake2002.com/news/slocmain_front.as p
Apparently they couldn't figure out how to change the default index setting. Or maybe 303 is beyond them.
Frames are a brain-damaged 2D-only design from Marc "we don't believe in DTDs" Andreesen's circus at Netscape, implemented unchanged without regard for the compatability complaints and fixes (mostly using LINK as originally intended) proposed by most everyone who saw the proposal. They were a fait accompli the W3C had no choice but to rubber-stamp. If a FRAMESET doesn't have equivalent ly useful NOFRAMES content, the author is thoroughly incompetent--and the design leaves making this particular mistake straightforward.
ECMAscript and the DOM only have serious value for distributed applications. Anyone who makes an ordinary document that can't survive their absence needs a boot to the head.
So, what you are saying, is that people who have industry standard OSes, or the capability to put it all together, shouldn't actually get an enhanced experience, because some dumb ass thinks that all content should be exclusively textual. You know, why are we fighting for scads and grundles of bandwidth to our homes if we only need 14.4 kbps? Sheesh. Maybe we should go back to getting all our information from the local preist and do away with the concept of wide scale communication all together.
I don't feel it's sufficient that most but not all people can access the Olympics site. That could be said about sidewalks without ramps for wheelchairs, too -- most people can step up the step fine, so why bother with ramps. Some people just don't get it until they're the ones in the wheelchairs. Yet others are donating their Saturdays to pouring the cement and paying for the supplies, too. Seems to be the way the world goes around.
The point in my initial review that Andy King then picked up for WebReference.com is not at all that they're using frames, Flash, JavaScript, and PDF -- those are all fine. The developers didn't also follow the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to include the NOSCRIPT tags, the NOFRAMES tags and other recommendations that would provide the alternate means of accessing the site.
The reason I wrote about this site in particular is because of the Olympics being such a major worldwide event and its even greater importance for anyone in the world to be able to access. If the developers had included the elements I mentioned above and in my review (and Andy's too), people who've turned off JavaScript (and there are plenty of them out there), using screen readers, Lynx, or other devices wouldn't be completely locked out as they are now.
I follow rowing. Rowing is still an entirely amateur sport. It is an athletic endeavour requiring great skill, strength and endurance. It fits the olympic ideal in every way. Yet every olympics since LA84 has attempted to reduce the number of crews attending, or eliminate some events entirely, to make way for new "sports" such as synchronized swimming.
Only fools train all their lives for one shot at olympic glory. You do it for the fun inherent in the sport, or for the competition, or whatever. But when the IOC can simply eliminate your event because it's not telegenic enough, you have to focus on something else.
--
E_NOSIG
The way that many of these outsourced projects work is that the look and feel is outsourced to one company that focuses entirely on the graphics and the layout. Once that is done, it is sent to a implementation and backend development company. Often, these two companies are separated, but the look company has greater control because the group that hired the two is part of marketting. This often creates a problem because the looks company is coming from a paper media background and expect the web to function the same way. They often ignore web standards, such as NEVER USE FRAMES, so that it would look "nice." When it does finally hit the web, it loses a lot of the expected functionality that typical web users look for.
Secondly, to cut costs, the implementation companies often take templated code for the project. Depending on the code, it is rather inefficient and troublesome on other browsers than the ones that they focus on.
Lastly, while I was typing this, I had to exit out of the website. The javascript was taking up 40-70% of my resources (running P2 233).
example of inefficient code (from the Olympics site): [Note: I've replaced the > and
If I were a company hiring someone to do a website, I would focus on their technical know-how rather than their artistic experience. Artistic experience is important up to and until implementation. If a site is poorly implemented that decreases the value of the artistic experience. If it is highly implemented, it often hides and shields the lack of "prettiness"
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
As for abandoning wide scale communication... you need to drink less coffee and get off the crack. Or see this link.
What you say about "design by committee" is entirely true; it was very difficult to walk the fine line of balance between wants and needs. Those with the most clout usually got their way unless you could present an extremely convincing argument. Needless to say, a lot of time was spent losing debates rather than constructing the product.
The first priority of the site, before the actual event, was to drive people to ticketmaster. Priority number two was "please our sponsors" and keep them happy. Number three was providing actual interesting content. And number four was considerations such as accessibility.
Personally, I didn't have a major problem with that. Sure, I wished that the commitee was a bit more visionary, but in the end the site accomplished exactly what it set out to do. I suspect that the Olympic site operates under a similar set of priorities and if it satisfies them, will ultimately be judged a success.
However, it is quite curious that their standards are so high. You'd think that they'd realise that the more people that could get to the site, the more opportunities they'd have to influence people to buy tickets. Oh well, that isn't my call.
To be honest, my experience was entirely worth it. It really tested my people skills, even if it didn't tax my technical skills. Fortunately, it all came up roses in the end, even if I'm very concious of the flaws in the end result.
Personally, I'd say that you might've passed up on a golden opportunity.
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
The fact that the website runs IIS and is incompatible with Lynx says nothing about the character of the people who live in the state. Not everyone is an incompetent MCSE (I, for example, have written several useful projects).
Surely I will get moderated down for this post.
-nitrogen
A solution to the problem with music today
you are at that point officially "adopted" into one of the tribes of Israel, thus making you non-gentile.
Be accurate, please. The patriarchal blessing informs you as to which tribe you have always been in, rather than serving as an adoption proceeding. The tribal membership doesn't necessarily have anything to do with actual ancestry.
On a related note, a Jewish friend of mine (who lives in Utah and has a very good sense of humor about it) likes to comment that Utah is the only place in the world he can be both a Jew *and* a Gentile at the same time!
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.