10 Accessibility Blunders of the Big Players

[ArticleBot]

This is an article discussion thread for discussing the SitePoint article, "10 Accessibility Blunders of the Big Players"

Some good points - however you fail to mention the complexity of the larger sites and the overheads required to update them. Very easy for smaller sites or SitePoint to do all the things you mentioned however most large sites I have worked with would only consider doing these things at redesign time (every 3 or 4 years).

[mmj]

A big accessibility blunder would be not to test a design in a variety of popular browsers on a variety of platforms, or worse, to create a site which will not work correctly in a particular browser. Sometimes this will be due to deficiencies in that browser, so even when creating valid and otherwise accessible code, it is still necessary to test in a variety of popular browsers.

The online banking service for one of my bank accounts works only in Internet Explorer on Windows, which excludes users of all other systems.

[patrikG]

Regarding: "Tables used for Layout"
There are still people out there using Netscape 4.* and other browsers that don't support, or only have a very selective implemenation of CSS1. Sure, CSS is fantastic, but if my website can't be rendered because it makes use of technology a browser doesn't know: not good.
It's a common pitfall to believe everyone cares as much about having the newest and best browser as us IT-people. To most Intenet-users it seems to be more like a car: it's been going for years, it's not broken, why fix or replace it?

[mserms]

Because you want to drive faster?

I agree that accessible websites should be the norm but the problem is down to 2 things really: Your user base and their technology.

If people are using older browsers that don't implement CSS/Layers then the designer has to look at a 'one size fits all' compromise to try and get their site to be viewed across all (or at least the majority of)browsers.

I am also not to thrilled about the accessibility thrust for the simple reason of how do you cater for everyone? I don't disagree with the need for sites that blind/partially sighted people can navigate but what about people with cognitive processing difficulties? How far do you have to go to make the site accessible? Is it really possible to have a 100% accessible site? What happens if the site is accessible to only partially sighted/blind people but not to those with colour blindness or cognitive processing difficulties? Will we see prosecutions brought against designers who've only catered for certain types of audiences who require accessibility?

Can the web designer really cater for all the potentially different types of accessibility without diluting the interface design/site content? I'm not all that sure it's possible, even though I do believe in the need for accessibility (I am after all typing this wearing my prescription glasses).

I think that there are too many politics here and the only ones who are going to benefit will be the lawyers not the designers or the audiences requiring accessible sites.

What about flash sites? Aren't these getting more popular for actual content based sites rather than just animated intros. These aren't accessible?

Sorry, Patrick G is right on this. Not only do most people believe "if it's not broke...." but also most users come from non-tech background. Take Firefox, i love it, i use it, but i only show my mum how to use IE. Why, cause when she goes on holiday and is in front of a PC everytime it's been IE. It's these people which are probably the higher % of users, and it's these people who don't care about the extra millisecond, they just want it to display it. I'm not against standards, but sometime you need to realise the user is not what we imagine them to be

[Jetteva]

Excellent article. A few years ago I was building a site that had to be 508 compliant. We wanted to test it with a screen reader. We thought it was doing well until the designer wisely turned the monitor off, then said, "now try it." That's the best test with a screen reader, turn the monitor off then try to browse your site. It was quite a learning experience.

[Chris Gwynne]

As Rob said you have to remember the sheer overheads that these large companies would have such they take on the mammoth task of converting to standards.

Places like Yahoo!, Amazon get have thousands upon thousands of pages they'd need converting which takes time. Also the publishing system they built may not cater to standards therefore a re-write is in order.

Also large companies keep to their out-dated coding methods so that their website displays in all browsers, as far back as Netscape 4.0, what happens if their websites didn't? Lost custom.

It's a good article yet it doesn't point out why they *could* be using out-dated methods.

Trenton,

It is YOU who have missed the point. You article is pretentious and miss-leading. I’ll do your job for you and clear up you mistakes.

“your Website uses images to display text, it's not AA or AAA accessibility compliant.”

WRONG ! The W3c guidelines don’t explicitly forbid this. There are a number of techniques where images can be replaced by text in the page mark-up and visa-versa. In it’s simplest guise, alternative alt text is permited and there are a number of server-side solutions where the text in the markup is replaced by bitmaps delivered to standard browsers (eg. IE or Netscape), and the assistive technologies are delivered textual content.

Use of Bitmap text is prefectly ok, as long as it is handled correctly.

“With so many different browsers and browsing technologies available, invalid HTML code can have really unpredictable results”

Granted there is little excuse for invalid Mark-up. However, pointing the finger at ebay is hardly fair. A significant amount of the Mark-up in an ebay page, is generated by the page-layout desinged by the user. E-bay can harly be hung-out and made responsible for the pratices of others.

“Man Utd's Website is so bad in terms of accessibility that it could have been named as the guilty party for each of the ten points in this article!”

The Manchester United Site is an EXCELLENT exmaple of a useable site. (me thinks your not a unted fan – perhaps a ‘city’ boy ?) your points are irrelevant:

They often offer less functionality than the main Website.
Well of course they do – talk about stating the obvious. Assistive technologies in their very nature have less functionality than their standard counterparts.
They are usually not kept as up-to-date as the regular site.
Granted in some cases – but I know for a fact the the Man uted example (you’ve chosen to slate) is managed via a single Content Management System – this is true of most major sites.
They can be seen as one more way of excluding disabled people from regular society.
You could in the same vian, state exactly the reverse of your point. Going the extra mile to create a version, dedicated to making the expeirnce of those with accessibility needs a good one, would be seen as a positive statement.
The regular Website may still be inaccessible to non-disabled people.
Why should the experience of able bodied users be lessened because a site is geared to AAA compliency. If a accessible alternative is made easily available then everbody wins.
A lot of what you said is in essence true, I just feel you’ve preached a bit with this article, and your good points about alt tags and relevant links have kinda got lost in the mist.

I can resize text on CNN fine with Firefox.

[mediaman_12]

Originally Posted by patrikG

It's a common pitfall to believe everyone cares as much about having the newest and best browser as us IT-people. To most Intenet-users it seems to be more like a car: it's been going for years, it's not broken, why fix or replace it?

If more and more pages look 'broken' and have a link about upgrading to something new for free then these people may get 'the massage'. The problem with keeping 100% backward compatibiltiy for ever is that although browser tec may evolve, we will still be being strangled by 90's era problems in 2025. People need to be cajoled into upgrading, Sites should still be useable in older browsers, but there is no need for 'perfect degridation'.

[boringguy]

There are only two reasons these websites listed would move to web standards. Reason #1 is if they were legally required to do so. This won't happen to the US-based sites. The US gov't has too many other things to worry about.

Reason #2 is if they could prove that there would be a Return-On-Investment to move to web standards as it would require largescale changes to their publishing systems. The ROI simply isn't there. It might never be.

[Viflux]

Anyone else notice that this article is from the future?

How's that for accessability...

As for the article, I think the biggest problem is a lack of awareness in the larger companies. I happen to work for one such company. We are now working on creating a compliant external page that will be cross-browser and cross-platform, but for now, our users are limited to IE 5.5/6 on Windows. In talking with some of our developers, they have no idea what the W3C is, no idea about web accessability or usability, and no idea why it matters. The fact of the matter is, these guys are old school programmers, trained in the arts of C and other such languages, who were "transfered" to the web development realm with the Internet boom. They don't have the advantage of growing up on the web and learning about these things from a young age, or having the time/will to read/learn about it now.

Our intranet applications are a whole other story. We have two enormous applications (I work for a bank) that tens of thousands of users use daily. They're all designed to run on NN4 on OS/2.

You should try browsing the web with that configuration

[z0s0]

"The fact of the matter is, these guys are old school programmers, trained in the arts of C and other such languages"

If anything that should serve to increase the quality of the code they write. There's no "transitional" in C++ or indeed any language. You either get it right (i.e. valid) or it doesn't compile.

I feel that the current state of affairs owes much to the fact that browsers were initially built to support crap coding, and in turn coders got lazy and did what they could get away with.

Which in turn attracted graphic designers into the fold who should never have been let through the door ;-P

[stkj]

z0s0 and Viflux, you are perfectly right about the state of affairs. Those C++ programmers now riding on the HTML wagon think their code is "right" since it's "working". You can't really blame them for that, but try to educate them of course.

In earlier Internet times, it was important for applications to "be tolerant with what you receive and restrictive with what you send". Without following such guidelines, the Internet had probably never got the success it got, and we would now probably have been stuck with OSI/ISO networks with limited functionality, expensive infrastructure an limited penetration.

Now when the connectivity is there and the users are there, it is time to clean up the mess. That is,

+ upgrade / get rid of old browsers (and other non-web applications)
+ browsers should be much more restrictive with respect to what they accept
+ browser vendors should follow the standards path
+ web "designers" must learn to use the standards

[Octal]

Originally Posted by pete

The Manchester United Site is an EXCELLENT exmaple of a useable site. (me thinks your not a unted fan – perhaps a ‘city’ boy ?) your points are irrelevant

If we're talking about manutdonline.org then I have to agree with Trenton, that site is far from accessible and does cover most of the points he raised in his article; tables for layout, no alt text for images and so on

Or maybe we are discussing manutd.com?
The very first page you come across is a splash page incorporating a large image (with no alt text). With images turned off there is no obvious way of even entering the site. Once inside the main page you will find tables for layout, missing alt text for important images such as the go buttons for reading news articles and questionable link text.

An "excellent example of usability", I doubt that very much.

In the interest of fairness I ran the same quick checks against Arsenal.com, the team I support and their site has some accessibility/usability issues such as non-descriptive link text

Originally Posted by pete

Why should the experience of able bodied users be lessened because a site is geared to AAA compliency

It is true that the W3C guidelines are found to be lacking even by the W3C members themselves. In their recent survey into website accessibility, the UK's Disability Rights Commission found that an alarmingly high percentage of the reported failings of websites in terms of accessibility and usability weren't even covered by the W3C guidelines!
However to address your point quoted above, disabled and able bodied people will both benefit from accessibile sites.

• Decreased page load times.
• Better SEO, intuitive navigation and compatability with alternative browsing devices means the information you need is available quicker, easier and in more places

[boringguy]

Originally Posted by Viflux

these guys are old school programmers, trained in the arts of C and other such languages, who were "transfered" to the web development realm with the Internet boom. They don't have the advantage of growing up on the web and learning about these things from a young age,

Classic age discrimination and therefore irrelevant. Try telling them about the standards. A C programmer embraces standards much more than an HTML coder... they have to or their code doesn't compile.

[trenton]

Originally Posted by pete

Trenton,

It is YOU who have missed the point. You article is pretentious and miss-leading. I’ll do your job for you and clear up you mistakes.

“your Website uses images to display text, it's not AA or AAA accessibility compliant.”

WRONG ! The W3c guidelines don’t explicitly forbid this. There are a number of techniques where images can be replaced by text in the page mark-up and visa-versa. In it’s simplest guise, alternative alt text is permited and there are a number of server-side solutions where the text in the markup is replaced by bitmaps delivered to standard browsers (eg. IE or Netscape), and the assistive technologies are delivered textual content.

3.1 When an appropriate markup language exists, use markup rather than images to convey information [Priority 2]. To quote the W3C: "Avoid using images to represent text -- use text and style sheets instead" (http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/...ech-use-markup).

If text is displayed through images it means it can't be resized for web users with poor vision. For users utilising screen magnifiers the text may appear blurry and pixelated if embedded in an image.

And I'd just like to add that I really object to your tone, Pete. A forum like this is great for challenging eachother's views and opinions and exchanging ideas - in a constructive manner. If you've got something to say then I'm sure you can say it in a less forceful manner.

[Viflux]

Originally Posted by boringguy

Classic age discrimination and therefore irrelevant. Try telling them about the standards. A C programmer embraces standards much more than an HTML coder... they have to or their code doesn't compile.

Hardly age discrimination. This is the fact of where I work. These guys learnt HTML "on-the-fly" in the '90s, have 5-10 years left in the workplace, have no desire to learn standards. C code that works is compliant C code. It doesn't have to follow the "best practices" in order to compile. HTML will work regardless of whether standards are followed or not.

It would be age discrimination to say ALL older programmers are like that, but I didn't. I was referring to those who work 11 floors below me that I had the pleasure of chatting with on occasion. I didn't mention their age at all. I have friends who, like me, are trained in C and Java and couldn't give a rat's *** about web standards.

But this is getting off the point of the discussion.

They have NO reason to adhere to web standards. Until the government starts forcing these large companies to follow accessability and usability standards, they aren't going to willingly invest hundreds or thousands of hours into re-writing their scripts so that a very small portion of the population can properly access their site. I don't agree with that, but it's the way it is.

[boringguy]

Originally Posted by Viflux

Hardly age discrimination. This is the fact of where I work.
They have NO reason to adhere to web standards. Until the government starts forcing these large companies

Okay, sorry... I took your initial post the wrong way... I thought you were saying it was necessary to grow up with the technology, career-wise, to embrace web-standards. I actually think that's part of the problem with all the folks pushing for web standards. The non-standard stuff just works. Why change it? Folks that have grown up with web technology (and I'm no exception) are used to things always changing and expanding. At some point, there's no point in changing anymore because there's no add'l benefit. Web standards may be that point.

A great article in computerworld http://www.computerworld.com/managem...,93808,00.html

about how all the business XML variants are failing to displace the 20 year old technology of EDI for electronic data transactions. EDI just works also. It might not be all-inclusive like the XML variants are trying to be, but it's already installed and running perfectly fine in thousands of businesses. It seems like the same battle to me.

I agree 100% on the gov't bit.

[jtresidder]

Originally Posted by trenton

And I'd just like to add that I really object to your tone, Pete. A forum like this is great for challenging eachother's views and opinions and exchanging ideas - in a constructive manner. If you've got something to say then I'm sure you can say it in a less forceful manner.

I agree with you on this, however I must say that your article came across to me as demanding that accessibility should be used on all sites. I disagree, I think that restricting or hindering access to a minority in the process of making a site for the majority is a purely subjective matter, so I can't see his post is much different.

Having said that, the article is informative and helpful on the points presented, it is only the reasoning behind presenting them that I disagree with.

Originally Posted by trenton

P.S. How do you put someone's name in the quote at the top?

Use 'QUOTE=name' instead of 'QUOTE' in square brackets.

[megamanXplosion]

Incorrectly Assigned ALT Text

I agree, this annoys me, a nondisabled person. When I'm browsing sites on 56k, it could be a while before those "pretty images" load, and until then, there's only one way to find out what image is there for, the alt-text. One site that I commonly visit is Dark Basic and the top dropdown menus have "Image" as the alt-text and that doesn't tell me anything at all, so I have to sit there waiting for the page to load to figure out what the heck I'm looking at. I could browse their site in half the time if this single issue were fixed. I don't care what kind of site you run or who your target audience is, don't be a part of this problem!


Non-resizable Text

Personally, I think they are twisting the wrong peoples' arms with this problem. Opera, Firefox, Mozilla, etc. all allow a good method of resizing text or the whole page to fit the user. Internet Explorer is the only reason why this rule even has to exist, it's text scaling engine is broken. Why should we have to, by law, compensate for broken browsers? Why shouldn't the browser the developers have to follow this law and fix their broken browsers? Personally, I do not care if my website text resizes in IE. The more problems I make for IE users, the more they will want to switch to other browsers and the more pressure is put on MS to get off their butts and fix this stupid problem.


Text Not Created Through Markup

I agree and disagree. If sufficient alt-text is provided then turning off images and scaling the page text should allow the text to be resized without sacrificing the display for nondisabled users.


Inaccessible Forms

I definately agree, these kind of problems should be fixed. Like the first rule, it doesn't matter who your target audience is, it doesn't hurt to make a form accessible. If all sites would just step up to the plate and provide labels for checkboxes and radio buttons then I would be a very happy person. There's nothing more annoying than trying to click those tiny boxes with a cordless mouse that likes to jerk occasionally.


Invalid HTML

This should be fixed.


Link Text Doesn't Make Sense Out of Context

I agree completely. Sometimes I don't feel like reading through a bunch of text so I open up my "links panel" in Opera so that I can quickly see the list of links which are provided on the page. A lot of the time, they do not tell me anything and it really hinders the user experience.


Using HTML to change font size/colour

I agree completely.


Tables Used for Layout

I agree completely. Those who were talking about NN4 browsers, simply do not serve them a stylesheet. If you do not serve them a stylesheet then the page will be shown to them in a linear and readable fashion. It's not uncommon to think that NN4 users will also be on a slow connection, so save them the bandwidth and give them a site which is readable, loads fast, and gives them a good reason to upgrade. This way, you will not be hurting them but you can still get your point across (upgrade your crappy browser).


Website Relies on JavaScript

I agree. JavaScript is nice but it should never be relied upon.


Separate 'Accessible' Version

Agreed.

[Widow Maker]

I use PX for font size all the time, as basically I do not want the user to alter the size of the text :)

Why ? Well, altering the text size mucks up the page structure that we spend so long making perfect cross browser, and for me that is time consuming and difficult :(

Though I think FireFox allows you to alter the text size regardless of what you use anyways :(

My thoughts anyways :)