accessibility_fail | Entries tagged with web

I had to yell to several of our senators earlier for unrelated reasons, and one has an email address hosted by an outside provider. Turns out the first time you email it, you get an autoreply using the Mailinblack service inviting you to type, in an image with several words, the one that's written in color. So in case you wondered whether someone would make captchas less accessible than they already were, the answer is yes.

(No advice needed - I'm not colorblind myself, it just infuriates me on behalf of any of their constituents who may be.)

jazzyjj

Hi everybody. Subject line pretty much sums it up. I'm wondering if anyone could test out the following website for accessibility: http://www.afb.org . I realize that this is probably a loaded request, especially given that accessibility means different things to different people. However, I've been having some issues with some parts of the website and am wondering if other people also experience these issues. I have been trying to purchase a free course from the AFB eLearning Center with no luck. It seems that this site is logging me out constantly, unless I tick the box that says "Remember My Username and Password." Even then, I am sometimes automatically logged out. Please see a prior entry of mine in this comm. I realize this is probably a security measure to protect against spammers and so forth, but the frequency with which it happens seems to be much greater than on other sites. The other issue I'm having is with the online store. It seems that, with VoiceOver at least, the navigation is somewhat off. It wraps around in a loop, but just a few days ago I was able to read a bit of information that was not accessible to me before. For the most part this website with its accompanying portals seems to work pretty well with VoiceOver and the latest version of Chromevox Classic, but I've not had good luck contacting the admins. Thanks in advance for anybody's assistance with this.

Current Mood: surprised
Current Location: bachelor pad, Illinois.

zdashamber

I'm going to give a five-minute presentation tomorrow evening on basic web accessibility (what to do re: designing and developing a website)... Here are the slides: https://slides.com/madelinebernard/webaccessibility

I'm interested in taking feedback on it, if you have any!

zdashamber

There are some useful links on this tumblr, http://a11ywins.tumblr.com/, if you create internet things or apps, or know someone who needs pointers.

pauamma

So earlier today, I emailed the following to one of the bitsavers.org maintainers:

Subject: Home for OCRed and proofread manuals?

So I snarfed http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/704/24-6661-2_704_Manual_1955.pdf and I'm now OCRing it and proofreading the result. I read the http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/ bit that says: "Documents here are kept in a minimal subset of PDF format, just using it as a container for lossless Group 4 fax compression (ITU-T recommendation T.6) images. Contributions are normally post-processed by tools to put them in exactly this format, so that all of the documents here are the same and
can be burst at some point in the future when OCR technology is mature enough to do a good job of recognition." which seems to imply you're not interested in providing a subset of those documents as OCR'd images+text searchable PDFs. But since I'm going to do it anyway, I'd like to share it with others. If you can't or won't host it on your own servers, do you know of another organization that could?

Within 10 minutes, I got this answer:

I need to update that. I have been OCRing documents for several years now.

(I answered thanking him, and asking about adding an alt= to the harvesting blocker img for the email address. More when I know more.)

sophie

So, for a while now I've been trying to get in touch with the people behind Damn You Auto Correct! about the inaccessibility of their posts. The site exists to host particularly funny instances of the iPhone's "autocorrect" feature, when one person in a conversation had an iPhone which decided to substitute another word in place of the one they were *trying* to type. Normally the corrections submitted to the site are sexual in nature, but occurring within an otherwise normal conversation.

The trouble is, these *textual* conversations are all submitted in the form of screenshots, with no transcript supplied. Every screenshot featured on the site is pretty much the same from a visual point of view: It's a screenshot of the iPhone's text message conversation view, which shows text messages from both sides of the conversation with your texts appearing in green speech bubbles on the right and the other person's appearing in grey speech bubbles on the left, with the other person's name showing up at the top of the screen and a text entry box at the bottom. And with that, I have described 95% of the images on the site, except for the text - which of course is what everybody's there for in the first place.

So, I tried to see if I could contact them anywhere. Couldn't see a "Contact" or "Email" link *anywhere*. To make a long story short, it turned out that my zoom settings push the "Email" too far to the right and so it disappears from view. (I use NoSquint, a wonderful Firefox extension that saves your zoom settings per-site and lets you adjust the zoom and text sizes independently for your needs.)

So I sent an email about both of these problems, and offered to help with transcription. I gave an example transcription in my email, so that they knew the sort of thing I was thinking about doing. I emphasised that it wouldn't take long to transcribe each one.

No answer, even after I sent a followup email about a month later. :(

It irritates me, because some of these conversations are hilarious and I hate that not everybody can view them!

codeman38

Found via several people on Twitter:

http://www.urbaccess.fr/

This... really should speak for itself.

Hope they don't expect any blind accessibility professionals to attend...

[If they change the site design at some later point: the entire navigation bar consisted of an un-ALT-tagged image map at the time I posted this. The conference information page is also an un-ALT-tagged image.]

Current Mood: confused

codeman38

In surfing for autism-related stuff today, I found this article from NIMH describing a new job training site designed for people with autism and other developmental disabilities.

So, being an autistic person myself, I had to check out the site in question:

http://www.do2learn.com/JobTIPS/

...umm, where's the menu? There's this big blank space where it looks like there should be a menu, and the "helpful hints" link definitely mentions that there should be a toolbar on the left...

::allows site in NoScript::

Ahh, there's... a bunch of images that are rather small and blurry. Let me look at the alt text...

::disables images::

Umm... OK, blank image icons with no ALT text, wonderful. At least the filenames actually indicate what the menu items are, so screen readers can sort of make sense of them, which is better than some sites I've seen. Let me try tabbing to that...

::continues hitting Tab, which skips over the menu entirely::

::turns on screen reader navigation, is able to tab to the menu items, but can't find where the pop-out menu is when I simulate a mouseover event::

::facepalms::

Oh, and to add insult to injury? The company's contact page has its form labels as un-ALT-tagged images (no, designers, it's not obvious to everyone that "eadd.jpg" = "e-mail address", especially with there being no <label> tags either). And an image-only CAPTCHA at the end of the form, on top of that.

I get the distinct impression that the people behind this have never actually met a person with a disability who uses the web.

Current Mood: geeky

delight

So I got really excited when I heard that Diaspora, an alternative social network, had gone live when

liv posted about it, and went to look at their site. This proved to be a mistake, because I could stay on their page for about two seconds before running and taking an anti-emetic and getting my eye patch and a cold compress. I think I'm only one of a few people in the world who has issues with straight white-on-black, but I can't be the only one.

The link is www.diasp.org, but I wouldn't advise clicking if you have ever in your life gotten a serious headache or have any vision problems. I can't even read words on that page.

( Here is a screenshot. )

I was completely shocked because it never seemed to me that Diaspora had this much fail about them, especially not in a) design or b) usability. I have since learned by a fluke of just trying it in another browser and leaving off the 'www' that just going to diasp.org produces a very nice and not ow website UNLESS you have issues with straight black-on-white (I don't except during a migraine attack; if you do don't click, it is VERY bright).

Seriously, Diaspora people, what is up with that, and why? I hope it's just a code glitch. I really, really hope. It makes no sense that anything remotely like this would be done on purpose, but not catching it is still accessibility_fail.

jadelennox

At some point in the recent past, the LJ leave-a-comment interface has changed all of its tab orders. Possibly they follow some more logical workflow, but they now have absolutely nothing to do with the order of fields and buttons on the page's visual representation.

LJ's accessibility fail keeps getting worse and worse. I had gotten comfortable with the idea of no longer posting there, reading my list over there, or taking comments over there. But now it's a massive spoon-suck even to comment over there, and I feel like LJ has been steadily doing its best to cut me off from my friends who are still on LJ. I don't WANT to leave them behind. They are on a platform that makes most sense for them.

You know how, when something just takes too many spoons to figure out how to do, you are left flailing, not even knowing how to express your frustration? That's where I am right now.

sophie

I wouldn't normally put an LJ fail in here, but this one is so outrageous that I feel I have to, and it's the result of a deliberate design decision.

If you have a LiveJournal, try going to one of your entries and clicking to edit the tags on that entry (that is, using the specific Edit Tags screen, not the generic Edit Entry screen). Then try to select tags to use.

It looks like they tried to make it easier for mouse users by making it so that you can click a tag and have the others remain selected when you do so. But since it's a listbox, it normally would clear the rest of the listbox selection when you do this. So it seems that they made it so that it remembers the items that were selected before, so that when a new item is selected, they then rebuild the selections in the list box based on what the previous selections were.

But if use the keyboard instead of the mouse, you're screwed. Just try to navigate that thing with a keyboard without accidentally selecting or deselecting tags that you didn't want to select or deselect. (I haven't tried any other means of input, so I can't comment on those.) At least it doesn't auto-save, so you can just close the window when you realise that it's pointless.

(I suspect that the page causes problems for people on any OS that doesn't automatically clear the rest of the listbox when you click an item.)

starwatcher

I will soon be moving my fanfic to Archive of Our Own, and to a Dreamwidth fic-site. When moving the fics, I'd like to ensure that my code is accessible for screen-readers. I know some things, but have questions about others. I asked the questions in a post at my Studio, but have had no responses; apparently no one in my reading circle uses a screen-reader.

If you do, I'd appreciate it if you could drop by and educate me. Or perhaps point me toward a site that has the answers. Feel free to pass the link on to anyone who might know the answers. After I've learned what I need to know, I'll make a new post to share with my friends, and anyone else who needs or wants the information.

Thank you.

jesse_the_k

(x-posted from my personal journal)

You may have seen Google/YouTube announce the magic of auto-captioning last November.

Gee whiz, they even had a deaf programmer write the blog entry. Things are good, right?

Watch this Bill Moyers interview with David Simon on YouTube. It's got captions. They're automagically generated with voice recognition. Compare the audio tracks and the caption track and be stunned at the high level of errors. Notice that White speakers' words are around 80% correct and Black speakers' words more like 30% correct.

Yes, it takes time to make good on technology's promise. In the meantime, disabled people put up with sub-standard services—and often at premium prices. When they're perfected, they'll be generally available.

These bad captions are particularly frustrating because the original sources were already captioned! Since the 1980s all network PBS (US public television) has been captioned; the same has been true for all HBO (paid US cable network) productions since 1995.

Arghhh.

Current Mood: enraged

jesse_the_k

I'm looking for a handful of iddly-fiddly products (camera case, iPod case, batteries) for one shipping charge. I was pleased to see Newegg.com on a Google search, cause I know they've been in business for more than 10 years. Leap on over to their site and I encounter this:

Screen grab of upper corner of Newegg.com site window, where bright red letters say For optimal viewing, please lower your browser's text size setting

[above is screen grab of upper corner of Newegg.com site window, where bright red letters say For optimal viewing, please lower your browser's text size setting]

Yes, I know it takes more time to design a fluid layout, where I can size my text up to something, y'know, readable.

But in return I will buy your stuff! With real US money! If you hadn't said anything, I would have used Mac OS X's built-in zoom feature and opened my wallet. But, no way, you had to boss your way into my user experience and demand I change my font size!

Current Mood: annoyed

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You Fail At Accessibility

Entries tagged with web

Mailinblack's mail-blocking captcha thingy

Request For Accessibility Testing of a Website

Web Accessibility slides

Tumblr for accessibility wins on internet stuff

This one's a win, I think.

Damn you, Damn You Auto Correct :(

How not to practice what one preaches

How not to design a resource for people with disabilities

Disaspora website + visual impairment + migraines = WTF

taborder matters

LiveJournal Edit Tags page

Accessibility question

The Reality of YouTube Autocaptions

Pushing Away Customers: Bossy Site is Bossy