codehesive.com : interaction design, user experience, gaming & miscellany » Accessibility

Accessibility guideline #1: Don’t claim it if you’re not

James — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 12:01:29 +0000

The Google Blog has a recent post entitled ‘Overview of our Accessible Services‘. Last time I looked at Google’s search code (which was only last week actually) I remember it being a particularly messy mix of invalid HTML and table soup (but this is Google: who for some reason are exempt from producing structureless mark-up on their main website in the 21st century, unlike almost everyone else on the planet).

While Google have obviously been working to increase accessibility of their services, this post is a classic example of the biggest faux pas in accessibility: claiming you are, no matter how hard you’ve tried to be (and in Google’s case, to be honest, they haven’t even tried that hard). Accessibility is science: claiming you’re accessible is a hypothesis, and therefore, always the chance that such a claim can be falsifiable. Google, I’m falsifying you now!

According to Google’s TV Raman, their top two ‘accessible’ services are their main web search and the new Google labs accessible search. The rationale?

Web search: Result pages include headers to delineate logical sections

Right, that’s good and all, but it doesn’t really excuse the dozens of tables that have no summaries does it? And headers really don’t magically make a page accessible.

And as for the new Accessible search:

Accessible Search: Promotes results that are accessible.

I haven’t played with this search enough to see if it does promote accessible results (I’m sure it’s a good service), but again, Google’s own code is a mess. It’s better than the main Google search, but still has huge amounts of inaccessible code.

You should never claim your site is accessible. Code for it as much as you can, test it as much as you can and show you conform to WCAG, but never claim it’s ‘accessible’. And even if you do, at least make sure it passes some automated tests: unlike Google, who barely scrape in at Priority 1.

Stuck!

James — Thu, 03 May 2007 21:33:12 +0000

Looking for hotels tonight on Radisson Hotels website and I quite literally got stuck. Trying to select a date range, the pop up date picker conveniently hides behind the big flashy Flash banner like some shy child cowering behind a parent’s leg.

Manually entering dates is also frustrating as some part of the Javascript intermittently clears the field when changing focus between the fields. Initially I honestly couldn’t get a date in. I’ve since tried again and it worked (barely). Just as well there’s a fairly obvious Reservations link in the top bar.

By the way, anyone know of any good hotels in Calgary?

British Design Museum and Accessibility

James — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 12:29:44 +0000

According to the British Design Museum website, they are:

…well-equipped to welcome visitors with disabilities. Our facilities include: lifts, wheelchair access, adapted toilets, and audio guides for selected exhibitions.

The irony of all this is that in the HTML version of the site (as opposed to the Flash) this text is rendered in a GIF with no alt text (and not considering the fact the site launches several pop-up windows). So unlucky if you’re visually impaired.

Or does this raise the question of whether you could truly appreciate a Design Museum if you were visually impaired? Or an art gallery? Or museums in general?

Regardless I do love the irony of disability services information appearing in probably the most inaccessible way possible.