[vicsireland] Re: Accessibility of website?
- From: Barry McMullin <barry.mcmullin@xxxxxx>
- To: vicsireland@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:41:17 +0000 (GMT)
On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Loretta Conaty wrote:
Perhaps some of ye would be kind enough to have a look at the below web site
as it is going live on 10th November and the lady setting up this new
business is very interested in making it accessible to the blind. It is
quite a large site and she is sensitive to all disabilities and so would
appreciate some feedback.
Hi Loretta -
As has been already said, it is very welcome for any web site
operators to pay attention to accessibility, and they should
certainly be strongly encouraged for that.
In terms of looking at the current site, a "proper" evaluation
would, of course, take a fair amount of effort, so I have only
been able to have a fairly cursory look; but on that basis, I
would personally have to say there is certainly scope for
significant improvement:
- The styling does not adapt well to font size scaling. With
moderate levels of font size increase, texts begin to overlap
and/or spill into areas with poor contrast, making pages very
difficult or impossible to read.
- Some headings are being used to structure pages, which is a
good sign; but they are not always used consistently or
clearly. So, for example, on this page:
<http://giftsandv.morsolutions.net/index/store-product?id=19>
there is a completely empty H1 element (actually coming after
several H2 elements) which definitely confuses my page
outliner.
- On that same page, which gives a sample from browsing the
catalogue of products, there are many product images, all of
which have alt attributes; which would normally be a great
thing. Except that, in this case, the content of the alt
attributes is simply repeating text that is already present in
the normal content of the page. In that circumstance I would
classify these images are "eye candy" and use null alt
attributes instead. But there is a problem with that, because
these images are hypertext linked, and we don't want links with
no associated text, but that brings me to my next point ...
- ... which is that there are a whole lot of links all with
the same link text (namely, "VIEW PRODUCT DETAILS" - and yes,
they are in all caps...). Now the targets of these links
duplicate the targets of the linked images; but, at best, that
is not at all obvious. The preferred mechanism
would be to hypertext link the phrase describing each product
instead ("Death by Chocolate", "New Home", etc.); but include
the corresponding image (now with null alt text) in the scope
of each link. Then there is only one link for each product, it
already has the correct text, the images don't duplicate this
text, and there are no links with duplicated link text. Win all
round.
- Another example page:
<http://giftsandv.morsolutions.net/index/product/?id=847>
This shows a form to actually fill in an order quantity and
choose some options for the time. The form fields all have
lables; and these labels have been marked up with the LABEL
element; but they have not been linked (via the "for"
attribute) to the respective fields.
Again, just to emphasise, this is not a scientific or
comprehensive review; it's just what I happened to notice on a
quick look. But it does underline that, although web
accessibility is not the proverbial "rocket science", it does
require professional, technical, expertise and it does
potentially require attention to a wide variety of details in
site design. Unfortunately, with the best will in the world, it
is not generally something that can be just "bolted on" shortly
before a site launches. So it is absolutely great that this
person or company is concerned about web accessibility, and I
would strongly encourage them to take the next step, which is to
ensure that there is proper professional support for it from
whoever is actually designing or supporting the system.
Best wishes,
- Barry.
--
Barry McMullin, Dublin City University
phone: +353-1-700-5432
web: http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~mcmullin/
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