Window-eyes reads all the links perfectly fine as I can see so it
shows how useless VO is on the web at this time.
On 2 Sep 2007, at 12:45, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
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
