Accessibility and Useability for the visually disabled

BBC Article on the lack thereof...

[BlobFisk]

Interesting article on the BBC Website about the the lack of accessibility work done by designers and developers for people with visual disabilities.

[news.bbc.co.uk...]

There are interesting comments made about using liability laws pertaining to access for the disabled to force companies to make their websites useable by and accessable to people with visual impairments.

[Mike12345]

A clever use CSS could come in handy for this purpose. SOmeone mentioned in an earlier post about changing the appearance of pages for the visually impaired. Im all for it. Interesting article by the way. Well spotted. :)

[BlobFisk]

What it shows to me was that there are still many, many designers and developers (none of WebmasterWorld of course!) who are happy to disregard the needs of a substantial number of users and not put the (let's be honest here) little bit of effort needed to make a site even slightly useable to surfers with visual impairments.

It also shows how many don't validate their code (which would pick up their lack of ALT and TITLE tags at least), or use the Bobby validator.

[Syren_Song]

There are an awful lot of designers and programmers using their alt tags for SEO purposes, and it only takes minimumal effort on their parts to change the tags slightly so they're more user-friendly and more friendly for the visually-impaired.

In the US, there's a mandate that all government sites have to conform to usability and accessibility standards, but it doesn't necessarily extend to non-government sites. It's really an "it depends" kind of thing.

[Googly]

I think it's a bit poor then that the main image on the White House web site has a huge alt tag and then repeats the alt tag wording in normal text below it. WHAT A NIGHTMARE!

Googly

[Syren_Song]

I never said the programmers did a good job on the government websites. I merely said they were required to make them accessible and usable.

Of course, much as I hate to admit it since it's my own government, but the work usually gets done by the lowest bidder. That kinda says it all sometimes. ;)