currybetdotnet Accessibility archive

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 11 - Feature chart and scores
Over the last two weeks I've been testing the accessibility credentials of 9 of Britain's leading online newspapers, The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Star, Guardian, Independent, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times. I've been looking at how they perform at basic accessibility tasks like re-sizing the text in a browser, rendering the page without images or JavaScript, and how a screen-reader emulator called FANGS copes with their pages. Yesterday I wrote in more detail about the...

Read the full post - Published November 20, 2007 in Accessibility, Newspapers, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 10 - Methodology
Over the last weeks I have been looking at the websites of the major UK newspapers, and assessing them for their accessibility features. I've worked out a way of scoring them on these features, and so tomorrow I'll be publishing a feature comparison chart, and a league table of which papers performed better in the testing. (Of course, everybody loves publishing league tables of someone else's performance, they just don't like to themselves be rated that way - just ask...

Read the full post - Published November 19, 2007 in Accessibility, Newspapers

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 9 - Daily Star
Although I originally only intended to review 8 newspapers in this series of posts looking at the accessibility of Britain's online newspapers, The Daily Star has recently re-designed. I therefore thought that it would be worth running my eye over the new design for accessibility features, in the same way that I have tested the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times. Text resize Sadly it seems that the new Daily Star...

Read the full post - Published November 16, 2007 in Accessibility, Daily Star, Newspapers, Product review, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 8 - The Times
I've been looking at how accessible British newspaper websites are, testing the most popular online papers against a set of criteria. So far I've looked at the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, The Sun and The Telegraph. Today, I'm looking at the accessibility of The Times website. Text resize The Times, along with The Mirror and The Guardian was one of only 3 out of the 8 newspapers I tested who allowed users to resize their text...

Read the full post - Published November 15, 2007 in Accessibility, Newspapers, Product review, The Times, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 7 - The Telegraph
Over the last week and a half I've been looking at the accessibility issues surrounding British newspaper websites, and testing some of the most popular against a set of criteria. So far I've looked at the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, and The Sun. So in broadly alphabetical order, provided you count the 'Daily' bit but don't count 'The'. Sometimes. Anyway, today it is the turn of The (Daily) Telegraph. Text resize Allowing your users to control...

Read the full post - Published November 14, 2007 in Accessibility, Daily Telegraph, Newspapers, Product review, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 6 - The Sun
I'm writing a series of posts about how British newspaper websites perform in a series of accessibility tests. These include simple things, like whether the text on a site is re-sizeable within major browsers, and more complex issues like how the site is rendered by screen reading technology. So far I've examined The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian and The Independent's sites. This post looks at the accessibility of The Sun's site. Unfortunately for me, after I'd done...

Read the full post - Published November 13, 2007 in Accessibility, Newspapers, Product review, The Sun, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 5 - The Independent
Last week I started a series of posts testing British newspaper websites against various accessibility standards and issues. So far I've looked at The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and The Guardian. Today it is the turn of The Independent. Text resize The Independent appears to be almost almost alone amongst the major newspapers in the UK in having a stylesheet 'widget' on the page to allow users to adjust the size of the text that they are viewing...

Read the full post - Published November 12, 2007 in Accessibility, Newspapers, Product review, The Independent, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 4 - The Guardian
I've been doing a series of checks on British newspaper websites to see how they match up to their accessibility responsibilities. So far I've looked at the Express, Mail, and Mirror. Today, in the last of this week's reviews, it is the turn of ex-broadsheet The Guardian. For each set of tests I have been looking at the homepage of a site, and then the top story from that day's paper, in order to access both types of template. For...

Read the full post - Published November 9, 2007 in Accessibility, Newspapers, Product review, The Guardian, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 3 - Daily Mirror
This week I'm looking at the level of accessibility built into British newspaper websites. I started with the Daily Express and Daily Mail, and today I want to look at The Mirror. I'm assessing the paper's homepage and top story page against a number of accessibility criteria. Text resize One of the simplest tests for accessibility is to see whether a site uses relative font sizes or fixed font sizes. Relative font sizes means that users can control for themselves...

Read the full post - Published November 8, 2007 in Accessibility, Daily Mirror, Newspapers, Product review, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 2 - Daily Mail
Yesterday I started a series of posts looking at the accessibility of British newspaper websites with an overview of the accessibility performance of the Daily Express website. Today I'm continuing the series by looking at the Daily Mail. I'm testing each newspaper homepage, and a subsequent story page, against a range of accessibility criteria. Text resize The Daily Mail is one of the newspaper sites that uses fixed font sizes in its homepage and story page display. This means that...

Read the full post - Published November 7, 2007 in Accessibility, Daily Mail, Newspapers, Product review, Web

How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 1 - Daily Express

Published November 6, 2007 in Accessibility, Articles, Daily Express, Newspapers, Product review, Web

"How do I get a refund for an ITV phone call?"

Published October 20, 2007 in Accessibility, Television

Alt tags reveal what is on the Daily Mail's mind about child sex offenders

Published August 13, 2007 in Accessibility, Daily Mail

Why doesn't the BBC iPlayer system tray icon use native Windows UI elements?

Published August 7, 2007 in Accessibility, BBC, Microsoft, Usability, iPlayer

iPhone and the blindness of the Apple fans

Published January 16, 2007 in Accessibility, Apple, Mobiles

New Victoria Line trains on display at Euston

Published August 10, 2006 in Accessibility, London Underground, Transport

Accessibility Help Across The BBC Site (Almost)

Published October 28, 2005 in Accessibility, BBC, Web