Re: BBC R4 Accessible Web Article on NOW

On Tuesday, December 10, 2002, 9:14:51 PM, David Woolley wrote:
> The web page backing the article is at:
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/intouch_factsheet.shtml

I so hate this. I want to praise these awards for increasing the
awareness of accessibility (which they are). But they seem to be doing
*such* a crap job at it.

I had a very brief look through the winners, let me see...

  * The British Museum Compass
    http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/compass/
    First page has a meta refresh. Beyond that, better than most.

  * Dial UK
    http://www.dialuk.org.uk/
    As scripting was disabled in my browser, I got no style at first
    due to their poor client-side browser sniffing. Otherwise good for
    accessibility (if a little verbose on the alt text).

  * Guardian Unlimited
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/
    I'm sorry? How on earth did this win an award for accessibility?
    Just look at it in Lynx - <http://tinyurl.com/3hu1>! Although the
    content is quite good, the surrounding design is very poor.

    I just don't know how this could win over BBC News
    (http://news.bbc.co.uk) or Ananova (http://www.ananova.com/news/).
    Madness.

  * The Local Heritage Initiative
    http://www.lhi.org.uk/
    Very good.

  * National Maritime Museum
    http://www.nmm.ac.uk/
    Hrm. Ok-ish. Could be better (and why does the text-only version's
    link to the graphical version say "HTML version"...?)

  * Whichbook
    http://www.whichbook.net/
    Whilst they have made clear attempts at making their site more
    accessible, it's a shame some people won't be able to get into the
    site in the first place - http://tinyurl.com/3hu5.

I really fail to understand how these awards have been worked out.
There are many, many more deserving sites than the few that have won
them. Very odd indeed.

But I have to say well done for the organizers for attempting
something like this, and to the BBC for covering the story.

-- 
Tom Gilder
http://tom.me.uk/

Received on Friday, 13 December 2002 01:25:43 UTC