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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.
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
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?
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
As for abandoning wide scale communication... you need to drink less coffee and get off the crack. Or see this link.
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