Re: What does accessibility mean for this web site?

At 00:05 1998/10/03 -0500, Scott Luebking wrote:
>Hi,
>Someone sent me the URL for a web site which uses a lot of dynamic HTML.
>I've been wondering what does accessibility mean for this web site.
>As an experiment, try looking at various pages of the site using
>a screen reader.  Then, ask a sighted person what is going on the
>various web pages.  What did you miss or not realize was going on?
>The URL is:
>
>    http://www.htmlguru.com
>
>Scott
> 
These are recollections made after the experience, from the visual
images that I retain from bumping into several pages, not always 
intentionally. Those pages expanded to full-screen, regardless of my
choice.

There is much more going on there than the eye sees. Lots of unfamiliar
visual tricks, masquarading scrollbars, layered material that hides, 
and reappears when the cursor moves over it. 

[Would a screen reader trigger the exposing of layers?]
 
Much too much visual cotton candy for my taste. Very little hard content 
in the early pages. The message is the movement. A second browser appeared.
Motion for motion sake, hardly for message sake, distracts. I believe 
little of what was there serves any purpose worth annotating! If Alt
text were used, it would need to move with the objects. Try to guess
where the cursor should go to invoke any alt text on it, or leave the
cursor in one place and hear whatever alt text were attached to whatever
passes over it! 

Find (Ctrl-F) does work with textual material. It fails with artsy word
images used as if they are clickable button regions, displayed on a curve.
There is no obvious ordering that a screen reader could exploit. Alt-text 
has minimal if any presence. 

[By the way, should Ctrl-F find content in ALT text at a user option?]

Some chapters of the author's book on DHTML were present. I suppose they 
had more than the first window's worth of content that I recall.

Faint colors occupy most of the artist's pallette. The animations used
rather coarse drawings, and they did not move smoothly. 

Screen 90% whitespace with whatever is displayed widely separated would
challenge a screen reader to find the objects, and give any rational 
ordering to them.

I should have tried to resize the full-screen window. I leave that to 
someone else, I've had enough of that page set.

Regards/Harvey Bingham

Received on Saturday, 3 October 1998 19:09:11 UTC