- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 11:12:44 +0100 (BST)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> > http://www.ikea-usa.com Had a look at this last night. The first page looked promising after a recovered HTTP protocol error but the rest went to blank frameset pages and JavaScript links, so I switched to Netscape, to discover that all the images were broken (status 404 - not found), which meant I was still viewing it text only, but with the added benefit of white on pale yellow text on the home page! If the assembly diagrams were the same as gets packed with the furniture in the UK, that would be a good feature about the site; it means that they are in the top (my guess) 15 percentile of commercial sites as far as solid information is concerned (one of the things I look for, but rarely find is instruction manuals - service manuals are even better - as they invariably give a much clearer picture of what the product does than the normal list of selling points, although still often fail to give significant technical information). However, I think you will find that the reason these diagrams are all images is that Ikea's home is a minority language country in a market with many languages, not accessiblity for those that cannot read. I actually find the lack of narrative in these diagrams can be quite frustrating as it is not always that easy to match up the flat, line, drawings with the bits and pieces you actually have in front of you. I can remember having to guess on some occassions. Again, if they are just the standard assembly diagrams that they have on the site, their inclusion is very cheap (but so would be the inclusion of instruction manuals for other products). (I also looked at the main site, but got hit by a request to download Flash, with no explanation as to how it would benefit me (other than revealing the contents of a blanked out pane) and one of the pages formatted with text overstruck on text in Netscape 4.51 for Linux.)
Received on Sunday, 22 October 2000 06:13:28 UTC