UPA Needs a Lesson in Accessibility
For an organization which is trying to push Accessibility as a complement to Usability, the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) fails. (Personally I think usability and accessibility are two very different things — both important — but I won’t get in to UPA politics right now).
I don’t specialize in web accessibility, but I’ve work on enough government web projects to know the basics of 508 and WCAG. One of these basics is to not use JavaScript linking. I’m not blaming the member directory developer who might not have known about this requirement or the UPA’s accessibility initiative, as much as blaming whoever didn’t do enough QC on their own website.
Screen readers cannot follow JavaScript links, and NOSCRIPT content only works if JavaScript is explicitly turned off. Besides being good accessibility, it is good web programming. Google can’t index JavaScript links and there are still a lot of developers who fail at checking JavaScript in ALL browsers. It is silly to not be able to link to a page because of a JavaScript error.
The UPA homepage also fails the Section 508 and WCAG checks because of something simple like missing alternate text for images. This is yet another web accessibility basic. Even if they are blank images, like spacers, alternate text (existant, but empty: alt=” “) is necessary to tell the screen reader to “skip” over the image. Otherwise the user annoyingly hears “spacer, spacer, spacer“. Really, these are basics that anyone involved in web design and development should know. Especially the “professionals”.
Message to the UPA: practice what you preach. You are making your members look bad. The UPA needs to focus on their own public face before trying to promote professional services elsewhere.
seele :: Mar.13.2008 :: General, Technology, Usability :: 6 Comments »
This is an artifact of .NET view state management. If memory serves me, these tools compound usability problems with unnecessary post-redirect-get cycles that defeat basic browser navigation.
Hey, I just got an angry phone call because of your precious little blog post. I’m the web designer for UPA and guess what, nobody told me anything about 508 OR WCAG when I got hired. They asked me to put together a site for them, ok?
So now I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to find a new job in a week to make my next mortgage payment and keep my kids alive. Thanks to your whiny blog post.
{the preceding is a reenactment of something that has yet to happen}
508 and WCAG are just things every web designer should have in the back of their heads constantly, like using CSS for layout, and using semantic markup to reduce dependency on hacks to make sites work.
Pointing out the flaws in a system isn’t whiny. UPA is an accessibility group, and they should be eating their own dog food.
Good luck trying to get a screen reader working with Konquerer :)
Very useful information :) I see there are realy good tips. I am going to use some of them
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