I founded a company that builds software focused on solving this problem. Interestingly enough it is fairly easy to build a *combo* page that is compliant with the standards. As a previous post stated the largest problems, with regard to accessibility, have much more to do with poor HTML usage, rather than an ignorance of the needs of disabled communities.
The problem that the government currently faces is that they have lots and lots of employees who build there websites yet know little of the world beyond FrontPage. This makes it difficult for them to build proper combination pages,a task that is relatively trivial for a well trained designer.
I actually am the founder of a company that builds software that allows people to diagnose the accessibility of their websites, sort of like a BOBBY on steriods. I posted a report of the IBM website at the following URL: http://www.ssbtechnologies.com/olympic s.html.
It is the report generated by our spider running through the Olympic site, to a depth of one, since they are using frames this is essentially the flash page. As you can see they fail to do some pretty basic, and obvious things, that can make a serious difference between a site people can use and a site that is useless. Titling your frames, not to difficult.
Hope this helps, if anyone has anymore questions shoot me an email, I am happy to chat about this stuff.
It should be pointed out the IBM, at least regarding it's corporate stance to Java 2, is one of the leaders in making software accessible to individuals using all manner of assisstive technologies. That is to say that IBM has applied extensive resources to solving some of the problems faced by people not using your standard point-and-click Windows boxes.
With this little disclaimer out of the way I can tell you that no website, however complex, will come anywhere near this long to bring up to compliancy with the basic accessibility standards as proposed by the W3C (Check it out: Web Accessibility Initiative) I don't care how huge, loafy, and beaureacratic you get, getting the basics of this shit down is easy! The company that I work for builds software that does just this and it takes us only 15 days to get huge sites fixed up, and we have ten people doing this. IBM, with it's hoards of programers, trained monkeys writing Shakespeare and all manner of web developers could not, possibly need a year and two million bucks to do this.
How long did it take them to build the site in the first place? Four years, liberally. So just to review the worlds largest computer services firm, with thousands of employees claims that it will take them 1/4 as long as the entire project to add some alt tags to images. Why don't they just admit they were stupid enough not think about this in the first place?
The question here touches something a little deeper than whether or not blind individuals can use a website. The fact of the matter is that blind individuals typify problems faced by a whole group of people. That is to say if we, as the progenitors of websites, fail to design with the widest possible audience in mind, we are inherently firming up the line between the information haves-and-have nots. (Sorry about that phrase, I hate it to but it seems to be apropos.)
By way of example what happens when you are driving along in your car and can't (shoudln't ?) take your eyes of the road but want to use your own personal Yahoo to find out the score on the 49ers game, in that instant you are effectively blind to the standard Netscape 6 / Ie 5.5 experience; your usage case mirrors that of a blind individual. You can't see the images on the webpage, the only way for you to understand what the page renders visually is to listen for the reading of the textual equivalents, the alt tags.
So the point here is that the issues that you would address to help allow equal access to information have implications that stem beyond the specific usage case of a certain audience. In other words the argument for universally accessible web page design has implications far beyond the disabled community. As such the focus should not be "What do I have to do to my page to get the blind users off my back?" The question should be how can I make my content accessible to the widest possible audience.
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I founded a company that builds software focused on solving this problem. Interestingly enough it is fairly easy to build a *combo* page that is compliant with the standards. As a previous post stated the largest problems, with regard to accessibility, have much more to do with poor HTML usage, rather than an ignorance of the needs of disabled communities.
The problem that the government currently faces is that they have lots and lots of employees who build there websites yet know little of the world beyond FrontPage. This makes it difficult for them to build proper combination pages,a task that is relatively trivial for a well trained designer.
Got 508?
http://www.ssbtechnologies.com/olympic s.html.
It is the report generated by our spider running through the Olympic site, to a depth of one, since they are using frames this is essentially the flash page. As you can see they fail to do some pretty basic, and obvious things, that can make a serious difference between a site people can use and a site that is useless. Titling your frames, not to difficult.
Hope this helps, if anyone has anymore questions shoot me an email, I am happy to chat about this stuff.
I can tell you, two weeks, I wrote one, it worked, not a big deal, and I am not even that bright.
With this little disclaimer out of the way I can tell you that no website, however complex, will come anywhere near this long to bring up to compliancy with the basic accessibility standards as proposed by the W3C (Check it out: Web Accessibility Initiative) I don't care how huge, loafy, and beaureacratic you get, getting the basics of this shit down is easy! The company that I work for builds software that does just this and it takes us only 15 days to get huge sites fixed up, and we have ten people doing this. IBM, with it's hoards of programers, trained monkeys writing Shakespeare and all manner of web developers could not, possibly need a year and two million bucks to do this.
How long did it take them to build the site in the first place? Four years, liberally. So just to review the worlds largest computer services firm, with thousands of employees claims that it will take them 1/4 as long as the entire project to add some alt tags to images. Why don't they just admit they were stupid enough not think about this in the first place?
But blind people really can't use your website.
The question here touches something a little deeper than whether or not blind individuals can use a website. The fact of the matter is that blind individuals typify problems faced by a whole group of people. That is to say if we, as the progenitors of websites, fail to design with the widest possible audience in mind, we are inherently firming up the line between the information haves-and-have nots. (Sorry about that phrase, I hate it to but it seems to be apropos.) By way of example what happens when you are driving along in your car and can't (shoudln't ?) take your eyes of the road but want to use your own personal Yahoo to find out the score on the 49ers game, in that instant you are effectively blind to the standard Netscape 6 / Ie 5.5 experience; your usage case mirrors that of a blind individual. You can't see the images on the webpage, the only way for you to understand what the page renders visually is to listen for the reading of the textual equivalents, the alt tags. So the point here is that the issues that you would address to help allow equal access to information have implications that stem beyond the specific usage case of a certain audience. In other words the argument for universally accessible web page design has implications far beyond the disabled community. As such the focus should not be "What do I have to do to my page to get the blind users off my back?" The question should be how can I make my content accessible to the widest possible audience.