Slashdot Mirror
Ask an Expert About Web Site Accessibility
Joe Clark is an expert on handicapped accesibility for movies, TV, the WWW, and other media. The launch party for his new book, Building Accessible Websites , is Dec. 3, which is also the International Day of Disabled Persons, so this a perfect time to ask questions about how to make a Web site -- or a TV show or movie -- accessible. As usual, we'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Joe, and run his answers verbatim when we get them back.
To put it bluntly, in this regard, Slashdot sucks.
The site is absolutely littered with horrible, nonstandard HTML, broken tags, tables, markup hacks, and other things that would confuse the bejesus out of any web accessibility tools.
Of course, the first step to solving this problem would be to overhaul Slashdot to resemble SOME form of web standards-compliance. That single step would improve accessibility tenfold. Instead, Slashdot has decided to ignore the problem and pretend it doesn't exist. I noticed they actually went so far as to block the w3c's validator from accessing Slashdot. (When you try to validate it, the validator complains that it received a 403.)
For such a widely popular website, Slashdot is poorly constructed, and has made no effort whatsoever to rectify the problem. For an example of a really nicely created site, take a look at Wired sometime. Run a page or two of theirs through the validator. View their source. They've learned to favor div tags over tables for formatting, and their pages actually validate properly.
The first step to accessibility is valid HTML. If you want to go further, there are some good resources available.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.