Re: Wired News: Accessibility of News Sites

Kynn Bartlett wrote:
>http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,47054,00.html
>
>Web News Still Fails Blind Users
>
>"Not everyone watched the images of the recent terrorist attacks
>on television. Visually impaired individuals turned to newsgroups
>and select websites to find emergency information and vivid
>descriptions. By Kendra Mayfield."

One of things I find surprising though is that at that time many of the
newssites that were still responsive were running more accessible sites
than normal, CNN for example was running an extremely accessilble site to
screen readers during that time, it had pared itself down to bear
information.

The BBC were running a normal site (their load balancing hardware was
failing but the actual webservers were running fast and fine.) and I
imagine with Betsie coming outside of the load balancing it was likely
faster.  Is Betsie not well known (I realise it is a US report, so that
makes some difference to us in the UK who would choose BBC first.), or
does it fail in its objectives of making news.bbc.co.uk accessible?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/education/betsie/parser.pl/news.bbc.co.uk/

(I'm not promoting the Betsie approach to making accessibility, just
genuinely interested if it's failing where news.bbc.co.uk is concerned.)

Jim.

Received on Friday, 28 September 2001 07:16:09 UTC