James Jolley wrote:
Try www.earrflix.com and tell me how doable that is without using vo
keys and h to get the urls, now is that good access?
I assume you mean http://www.earflix.com/ (you repeated the R).
What do you mean by "get the urls"? What do you mean by "vo keys and h"?
What is that supposed to do?
There are major accessibility problems with the page at that URL. The
navigation consists of a series of image links without specified
alternative text (you can check this for yourself by viewing the source
and noting the absence of a single alt attribute). Fundamentally that is
a bug in the page that be should be reported to the page owner.
Unfortunately, the contact link is also an image link.
Having said that, I do think Safari and VoiceOver could do more to cope
with that bug. The User Agent Accessibility Guidelines published by the
W3C suggest trying to repair the absence of alternative text by faking
alternative text from other information:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-USERAGENT/guidelines.html#tech-missing-alt
Some screen readers will read the title attribute of the image or the
anchor if there is no alternative text. That would help here; for
example the title for the contact anchor is: "Contact earFlix.com".
Some screen readers will read the URL (or part of the URL) of the image.
Sometimes that is pure gibberish (e.g. on the Winamp website), but in
other cases it can be useful, as here. For example the URL of the image
used for the contact link is:
images/earFLIX_contact.jpg
As far as I know, no browser or assistive technology actually retrieves
linked pages to find out what image links actually link to and provide
relevant alt text based on that, despite this being suggested by the
Guidelines. Thanks to web author errors, there are some problems with
doing so, but I do not believe they are insurmountable with a careful
implementation. For more details see:
http://www.freelists.org/archives/nvda/04-2007/msg00311.html
Some screen readers also allow users to label images, and in the case of
System Access allow users to share those labels with other users.
I think it would be good for Safari and VoiceOver to do all these things.
For what it's worth, I don't think your missing much by not having
access to EarFlix. All they seem to sell is audio versions of the Narnia
and Left Behind movies; I suspect audio versions of the Narnia and Left
Behind books would be of more interest. Nonetheless, I've reported this
problem to Earflix via their contact form:
http://www.earflix.com/catalog/contact_us.php
as follows:
> Hi. People with visual impairments are an obvious market for audio
> movies. Yet your website does not follow with key guidelines and best
> practices intended to make web content accessible to people with
> visual (and other) disabilities:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/
>
> Your homepage has a series of image links where the alternative text
> used by screen readers is misplaced in the title attribute rather than
> the alt attribute:
>
> http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/altAttribute
>
>
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200412/the_alt_and_title_attributes/
>
> This includes the Contact link, which may explain why you haven't
> received complaints about this before!
>
> Some assistive technology products use specific techniques to get
> around this sort of author error, but there is no guarantee that
> would-be customers are using those products. For example, people
> using the Mac will only hear "image link", not the actual link
> text. Consequently, your site was recently mentioned as an example of
> an inaccessible site on the MacVisionaries mailing list:
>
> http://macvisionaries.com/pipermail/discuss_macvisionaries.com/
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
