Web Directions

ABC mobile web site fails accessibility test

• In: Blog
• By:Maxine
• March 17, 2009
• Leave a response

As reported over at Crikey today, this is pretty embar­rass­ing for the ABC.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation launched “ABC Mobile” yes­ter­day. Unfortunately, the home page does not appear to have been designed in accor­dance with guide­lines for web acces­si­bil­ity for the dis­abled and may be unlawful.

The site was tested using the Test Accessibility Web tool, against the WAI guide­lines and found to have 1 Priority 1, 14 Priority 2 and 1 Priority 3 prob­lems with the page, with the pri­or­ity 1 prob­lem being the obvi­ously the most egre­gious and embar­rass­ing, but also the most eas­ily fixed — no usable alt text on the main nav­i­ga­tion menu of the site. Ooops.

I think it’s actu­ally more wor­ry­ing though that at a ded­i­cated mobile site, the W3C mobileOK Checker only scored them at 79/​100 on mobile com­pat­i­ble tests.

4 responses to “ABC mobile web site fails accessibility test”:

1. • By:Andrew
   • March 18th, 2009
   

   Please don’t base crit­i­cisms on auto­mated tests, it shows a lack of under­stand­ing of the actual under­ly­ing issues. Automated acces­si­bil­ity tests in par­tic­u­lar will often return false pos­i­tives that require an expert analy­sis to con­firm or deny.

   I’m not say­ing the ABC mobile site is with­out fault, I’m just say­ing I would rather read an arti­cle based on informed opin­ion and expert review than one point­ing out low test scores. Explain the issues! Then every­one can share in the learnings.

2. • By:Maxine
   • March 18th, 2009
   

   Andrew: it would be great if some­one involved in the project could weigh in here and give some expla­na­tion about their deci­sion mak­ing processes. From an out­siders point of view, all we have to go on is those test results. This whole topic offi­cially open for discussion!

3. • By:martinjy
   • March 19th, 2009
   

   +1 for Andrew’s com­ments. Run that auto­mated test on almost any site and you’ll get hun­dreds of results. Sure, the ABC could (should) have caught a cou­ple of the obvi­ous errors before release, but this is a non-​​story with­out some proper analy­sis by Crikey.

4. • By:Hugh B
   • March 19th, 2009
   

   Thanks for point­ing this out, Maxine.

   Firstly, (and not your fault) you are link­ing to an arti­cle I can only see the sum­mary of. Where’s the acces­si­bil­ity there? Gotta love that locked off content.

   True, we don’t have access to their deci­sions, but you do have more to go on than the test results. You can look at the served source code and give us your own eval­u­a­tion. Andrew has struck on a very impor­tant point. What do you think, as an expert, about the site’s compliance?

   The great fail I’d like to see the inter­nal deci­sions around is the choice to serve this con­tent sep­a­rately. As experts and trustees of taxed money, they should be able to adhere to the most basic web vision of one resource being con­sum­able by any standards-​​compliant user agent. Remember Berners-Lee’s rail­ing against the .mobi top-​​level domain?:

   “This domain will have a dras­ti­cally detri­men­tal effect on the Web. By par­ti­tion­ing the HTTP infor­ma­tion space into parts designed for access from mobile access and parts designed (pre­sum­ably) not for such access, an essen­tial prop­erty of the Web is destroyed.“

   I don’t think the ABC will single-​​handedly harm the Web, but this is the same, only using the new “m” hostname.

   BTW nei­ther Andrew or I are ABC employees.

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