Accessibility in the news

– posted December 8th, 2006 by Laurence Veale Comments (8)

Accessibility spotted on the web this week:

Courtesy of etre, an excellent BBC introduction to Accessibility on YouTube
A BBC story on a report highlighting the sorry state of accessibility on the web
Search Thresher: filters out inaccessible websites from search results in all the major search engines through content labelling.

Read on…

An introduction to accessibility on the Beeb

An excellent introduction to accessibility via the BBC story, Designing a more accessible web. The accessibility video is also available on YouTube and embedded below.

More accessibility on the Beeb

Fresh from the BBC website, a story titled Most websites failing disabled, covering a report issued by UK usability agency, Nomensa, in which they tested a number of leading websites across a range of industries. The results:

3% failed to provide adequate text descriptions for graphics
73% relied on JavaScript for important functionality
78% used colours with poor contrast, causing issues for those with colour blindness
98% did not follow industry web standards for the programming code
97% did not allow people to alter or resize pages
89% offered poor page navigation
87% used pop-ups causing problems for those using screen magnification software

SearchThresher: Need to separate the wheat from the chaff of search results?

At Wednesday’s irlDean accessibility day Paul Walsh from Segala presented an overview of Segala’s SearchThresher. It’s Firefox plugin that flags search results based on metadata or content labelling. Although SearchThresher has far more wide reaching scope, in the context of accessibility, if you perform a particular search on your favourite search engine, your results can be filtered based on whether the site linked to in the results is verified as being accessible. Powerful stuff.

Paul Walsh discusses the technology with Tom Raftery in a podcast on podleaders.com

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Categories Accessibility, Spotted

8 comments so far

1. Dave Davis on Dec 8th, 2006 - 10:49

Great post and a wonderful video. Nice to see our argument put into real life context. I do find it a little ironic that in the amazon example, it was a blind girl looking for a book.

I have to agree that it’s not going to happen overnight, but I do think that it’s responsible of web designers and developers to not only educate clients about this, but implement accessible design by default.

2. Lar on Dec 8th, 2006 - 12:11

Thanks for the comment, Dave.

In terms of the irony, I actually use a similar example to get people thinking about accessibility in my training courses and presentations.

The important point is that if I were blind, I may still want to buy a book or car insurance for someone else.

Assume makes an ASS out of U and ME and all that.

3. Dave Davis on Dec 8th, 2006 - 13:25

I fully agree Lar. But it’s a point like that that needs to be made ultra clear. Many of our clients don’t understand how it effects THEM. It is a difficult task selling accessibility without sounding like your SELLING accessibility.

For example, a client wants a website selling cars. They simply cannot see why a blind person would be interested in their product or be a viable potential customer. It’s coming up with useful examples like you just did that can sometimes be tricky.

I believe the sooner some sort of legislation is brought in regarding this the better.

I actually think one of your workshops might be a great place to share ideas on how to demonstrate the need for accessibility online.

4. Laurence on Dec 8th, 2006 - 13:44

Thanks for that Dave. I’m going down to Bar Camp South East in January. I’ve put myself down to talk on better powerpoint presentations but may also put myself down for accessibility.

5. Dave Davis on Dec 8th, 2006 - 13:54

Going to try and make that one.

Thanks for the replies. You have actually given me a few great ideas.

6. Richard on Dec 8th, 2006 - 17:24

Nice recap of a few stories.

BBC story was interesting.

I saw the SearchThresher story but wonder does that mean that your site has to be validated by a 3rd party? Or is it on the fly?

Rgds

Richard

7. Laurence Veale on Dec 8th, 2006 - 19:54

Hi Richard,

your site would have to be validated by a third party. In terms of accessibility, you would have an independent audit performed and be awarded a digital (or machine readable) certificate on the basis of that audit.

If your site contained medical advice, it would have to be passed as being “trustworthy” by a body like the HON (Health On the Net, http://www.hon.ch), would would award your certificate.

Another application would be “child friendly” sites, currently labeled voluntarily by site owners under the ICRA.

8. Richard on Dec 9th, 2006 - 13:29

Hmm… that’s what I thought, and that’s where the dificulty arises.

Once you go out to third party you ave the difficulty of such a service requiring a certian critical mass in order to go mainstream.

It’s a nice idea for sites that are required to be accessible, e.g. govt. and public websites.