Lack of accessibility of web presence for conference on technology & persons with disabilities – #CSUN10
Updated: 2010-03-08: A call to action met:
Proving their willingness to address issues brought forward, CSUN has shocked many (including this reader) by their responsiveness in addressing the accessibility issues identified on the page below.
Having fixed up the link issues on the page itself, fixed heading issues, cleaned up some of the code, provided some information about the strange table construct intended to visually provide the layout of the exhibit hall, the page is vastly more usable than it was just a week ago when the issues were identified. The only outstanding issue relates to the information itself, see article:
http://blog.blackspheretech.com/?p=45 Lack of equitable access to wayfinding information
However, my hat goes off to the organisers in even achieving what they have in just a week.
Original Article:
You would think that a conference on technology & persons with disabilities that includes tons of sessions on accessible web design, technology & accommodation’s would consider accessibility as a priority in their web presence; however this does not seem to be the case.
<br><br>Accessibility isn’t rocket science. We have had well defined web accessibility standards (W3C Web Accessibility Initiative: http://www.w3.org/wai) in place for almost 20 years. Free courses exist by the droves to explain web accessibility from a whole host of directions for a whole host of audiences. There are also free and for pay accessibility validation software & sites that can pick up the most common problems. So today, there is no excuse for having a site that isn’t accessible (especially for a conference that is guaranteed to have a ton of persons with disabilities attending).
I ran a single page from the CSUN conference site through an html & accessibility validator and got the following results: (It should be noted that this is in no way exhaustive nor a full accessibility evaluation but simply less than 5 minutes worth of work looking at one page of the site and some of it’s html standard compliance & accessibility compliance issues.. .
On the following conference page: CSUN Conference Page That was evaluated http://bit.ly/duzw50 the following errors were identified by the validator:
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If one is looking at the accessibility of the site, it should also be noted that it’s full of meaningless links that in no way implicitly identify their destination, pages that are full of data that should really be marked up as a data table and a strange graphical map like construct that they have built with a table.
These are just the easy to find issues. Someone should step up and do the right thing.
Jennifer Stanley responds:
Posted: March 4th, 2010 at 10:44 am →
I tried to navigate the site and the 100s of useless links make the site virtually unusable.
Everett Zufelt responds:
Posted: March 4th, 2010 at 8:14 pm →
It always makes me laugh a little when web content for an accessibility related organization or event is poorly accessible. This page is a little beyond belief. I can’t imagine that anyone took universal or inclusive design into consideration here. My biggest critique of the page would be all of the links with nothing but numbers for linked text and no real context. Where will these links take me? Maybe this isn’t visually apparent either, which would then not necessarily be a strict violation of WCAG 2.0, but remains a pretty poor design.
Jared Smith responds:
Posted: March 5th, 2010 at 3:25 pm →
The page you are evaluating can certainly be improved on the site, but I think the evaluation tool you are using is overly broad in casting a negative light on the actual accessibility of the page.
A few comments:
– The pop-up window is bad. I agree with this one for sure.
– None of the validation errors or warning have any impact on… well, anything – certainly not screenreaders. They use ‘&’ in a link, a greater than sign in content, and they have an uppercase closing tag instead of lowercase. Yes, it’s not valid, but as far as I know the validation issues have no impact on accessibility.
– Headings *are* correctly structured. The page starts with an h4, but nothing in the spec or accessibility guidelines says this is wrong or bad. The tool is wrong in suggesting this is incorrect, let alone inaccessible. The main content begins with h1 with proper subheadings below that.
– There are no data tables, so no need for headers or summary.
– Missing image width and height can cause rendering issues on load, though I’d hardly consider this an issue for the one image on the page.
– There are no overly long sentences or paragraphs as the tool suggests.
– The URL is overly long, complex, and unintuitive.
– I’m not quite sure what using a deprecated image border has to do with accessibility. It’s deprecated, not invalid or incorrect.
– The page title is overly long and non-descriptive. It’s the same on every page of the site.
– The page is full of a lot of links that are generally meaningless if you can’t see how they are visually presented. It is a map of exhibit locations – something difficult to convey any way other than visually. However, I would note that this is just one presentation of the exhibitor information. The main exhibitor page lists the same information by exhibitor rather than by booth location – the same information in an more friendly, accessible format. The nature and layout of this page could have been explained on this page to avoid confusion.
So, while I agree with some items, I also think that the site in general is not as inaccessible as is suggested. I do have to give them credit for making tremendous improvements to web accessibility, even over just one year ago. Thanks for pointing all of this out – let’s hope CSUN takes note and fixes the things that are relevant.
Jeffrey responds:
Posted: March 5th, 2010 at 8:40 pm →
The argument wasn’t if the site had improved or not (it has improved over the years); simply that it isn’t a shiny gem as it relates to some of the information provided. I agree with you that there are tons worse sites. I also agree that the validator (both html & accessibility) overlooks some of the larger issues on the site. However, the point was that there are faults identified by even a validator. Not necessarily that they are the only issues, nor that they are the most severe. Simply that they are the easiest to fix and identified with ease.
The intended purpose of this specific page is to provide sighted people with the ability to plan their trip through the exhibit hall by providing wayfinding information. (Booths, aisles, paths to areas). So a huge directory of booths is not equivalent information, as you still have no idea how to get there. (
As identified previously in the following blog post: http://bit.ly/a7d9w9 ).
I think some of the larger issues with the site are the the monumental amount of meaningless link text, information that should really be marked up as a data table or better/more thorough heading structure in order to make it even somewhat meaningful (i.e. the exhibitors directory) and the slightly wonky outline/heading structure (see: http://bit.ly/acJnnR ).
On the plus side, I was able to register & found those sections of the site to be both fairly accessible and usable with a screen reader. I think it’s great that when they do have data tables, that they are pretty superbly marked up.
However, on the down side, there are some pretty significant issues also.
Michael Moore responds:
Posted: March 7th, 2010 at 1:41 pm →
I’m glad I’m not the only one having problems with the site
Jared Smith responds:
Posted: March 8th, 2010 at 7:19 pm →
I’m happy to note that CSUN has taken note and addressed most of the issues brought up in this post and the comments. It’s not yet perfect (heck, name me a site that is!), but it’s wonderful that they are responsive and trying. They are also open to further recommendations.
This page, as I noted above, is probably not the best example of the overall site’s accessibility, but even on this page they have made significant improvements. So cheers to CSUN for improving accessibility and cheers to Jeff for bringing this to everyone’s attention.