Dear Flying Spaghetti Monster, save me

[codeman38]

The web site for Maruchan Ramen.

A shining example of how a site can be perfectly compliant with the heuristic "all images must have ALT tags" while still remaining utterly inaccessible. The entire site is an image map of 23 sections, every one of which is tagged "Maruchan, Inc. - Maruchan Ramen Noodles - Ramen recipes - Japanese ramen noodles".

Through a screen reader, it's a bit like listening to Monty Python's Spam sketch: ramen, ramen, ramen, images and ramen.

Edited to add: Oh, yeah, I forgot the best part. There's a text navigation bar at the bottom... each link of which goes to another page whose content is entirely in the form of badly-ALT-tagged images. ::facepalm::

Comments

[jadelennox]

ROFLMAO. I just 30 min. ago finished writing a document talking about how accessibility is an art, not a science, and websites can pass validators without actually being accessible at all. Now I will have an example if anybody asked me to verify it.

[jesse_the_k]

A new high in lows! I don't think "congratulations" are exactly in order, but thanks for proving just how pointless thoughtless image-tagging is.

[technicolortimecoat]

this is hilariously awful

[kelly_holden]

I get the impression that whoever did this can't work a web design program properly. Most of the pages have a large, simply-shaped, block of plain text in it that is part of the images, when even without the accessibility concerns that strikes me as an odd thing to do. Additionally, all the images I looked at are much larger images scaled down in the HTML, which makes the text hard to read even for me, and increases the download time even more.

[codeman38]

That's basically the impression I got as well. I've seen similar sites elsewhere from people who only know how to use Fireworks but not an actual web authoring program.