Recent posts in my Accessibility Category
August 23, 2012
Why your news site should never automatically open external links in a new window
A question that I used to get asked time and time again in the comments underneath techie blog posts on the Guardian was why the site didn’t open external links in a new window. And I get asked variations of it elsewhere, so I thought I’d just take five minutes to set out why, on the 21st century internet, forcing links to open new browser windows is wrong.
October 18, 2010
London 2012 Olympic ticket prices accessibility failure
A long list of numbers is the very definition of tabular data, easily represented in an accessible HTML <TABLE> structure. And yet the ticket prices for the Olympic games were only made public as a PDF file...
June 1, 2010
Future of web design: Inclusive web design by Robin Christopherson, and a couple of misses
Here are my 'Future of web design' notes from an excellent talk about inclusive and accessible website design from Robin Christopherson, and some notes from a couple of sessions that didn't quite do the trick for me...
July 25, 2009
Spotted! A multi-lingual sign on the tube
One of the notable things about our travels through Eastern Europe a couple of years back was that we could pretty much make our way around with only learning a smattering of 'yes', 'no', 'please' and 'thank you' in any country we came too. Nearly all of our travel arrangements could be made in English on the web, and pretty much every travel interchange we used came with copious amounts of dual language signage including English. Visiting Macau and Hong...
November 20, 2007
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...
November 19, 2007
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...
November 16, 2007
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...
November 15, 2007
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...
November 14, 2007
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...
November 13, 2007
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...
November 12, 2007
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...
November 9, 2007
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...
November 8, 2007
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...
November 7, 2007
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...
November 6, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 1 - Daily Express
The 1995 Disability Discrimination Act put the force of law behind the principle that businesses should not discriminate against people with disabilities in the provision of their goods and services. Although yet to be tested by major case law in the UK, it is generally accepted that 'services' includes a business web site, and that therefore businesses should take care to make sure that their sites are as accessible as possible. In theory, this is trivial to accomplish. All that...
October 20, 2007
"How do I get a refund for an ITV phone call?"
"How do I get a refund for an ITV phone call?" - a question that around 10 million people might be asking themselves today. Or maybe they are thinking: "I wasted money on entering a competition via telephone or SMS, and I want to get my money back from ITV" Either way, they are probably not thinking, oh I know, I'm a consumer who needs a PRS reimbursement. However, that is exactly how ITV have phrased the call-to-action on their...
August 13, 2007
Alt tags reveal what is on the Daily Mail's mind about child sex offenders
Alt tags on images can often reveal what is going on in the minds of the people building a website. Designed to assist accessibility, most browsers display the contents of the tag as placeholder text whilst an image is loading. And since here in Greece I generally view the internet through 28.8Kbps spectacles, I tend to see this more than most. The Daily Mail has had a wonderful example during today in the promotional strip for their 'Femail' articles which...
August 7, 2007
Why doesn't the BBC iPlayer system tray icon use native Windows UI elements?
Well, it's been mostly iPlayer this and iPlayer that around here recently, and today is no different - and this time I have a bit of a user experience gripe. The iPlayer library software does something that really annoys me on Windows machines - not taking advantage fully of the common native UI elements. One of the reasons that any OS like Windows or a Mac OS has a standard set of UI elements is so that they can...
January 16, 2007
iPhone and the blindness of the Apple fans
Well, it seemed churlish not to join in with virtually every other blog I read and not post something about the mobile phone / multimedia device you may have seen launched by Apple last week. I have to start by saying that I am intrigued by the user interface, and I'll be fascinated to hear about how people get on with it out in the wild. Rather than talk about the much-vaunted product itself, I wanted to look at a...
August 10, 2006
New Victoria Line trains on display at Euston
Yesterday I visited the temporary exhibition outside Euston station of the new Victoria Line Underground rolling stock which is due to make a debut on the line in late 2009. The display was in a marquee at the front of Euston, and featured a prototype of half of one of the new style carriages. What is it about the marketing material for these kind of events that forces people to use puns all the time? We're on track to introduce...
October 28, 2005
Accessibility Help Across The BBC Site (Almost)
We made a site-wide template change at the BBC today, to add an "Accessibilty Help" link to our new My Web My Way section in the left-hand navigation of the page. Coupled with the 'Text only' link in the top left-hand corner of every page with standard navigation, it means that the links most needed by people with accessibility issues should be virtually the first thing they come across on any BBC page. Well, it was sort of site-wide. When...