[thelist] Re: New York Times article about Olympics site accessibility (or lack thereof)

Shirley Kaiser (SKDesigns) skaiser1 at skdesigns.com
Thu Feb 14 22:56:01 CST 2002


At 03:21 PM 2/14/2002, you typed:
> > the new york times (login required, registration is free)
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/14/technology/circuits/14ONLI.html

>Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 17:52:30 -0500
>
>the new york times (login required, registration is free) reports on the
>status of the accessibility of the winter olympics web site, mentioning
>shirley kaiser, a member of thelist (but this is only one of her many
>credentials), who was first to write about the design of the site and its
>dependence on javascript
>
>way to go, shirley

Hey, thanks, Rudy!! Pretty exciting stuff to get my 3 seconds of fame
there! The main thing, though, is to get some good publicity for
accessibility issues. As I wrote in my follow-up article just now, although
Perkins (Internet director for the Olympics games) states that they've
resolved some things, they really didn't, IMO. They added some text links
to MSNBC news articles, but they still don't provide a text alternative to
the site. So now when people access the site without JavaScript enabled
they're redirected to a plain page with a bunch of text links to MSNBC news
articles about the Olympics instead and with no explanation, either.
They're out of luck if they're trying to find out a schedule or anything
else at the Olympics site. Agh!!

I wrote more, too:
<http://www.brainstormsandraves.com/2002_02_10_archive.shtml#9743857>

<tip type="accessibility">Provide alternative access to your site via text
links as needed, use informative information for image alt tags, include
alternative text in NOSCRIPT and NOFRAMES tags if you use JavaScript or
frames, and design for accessibility from the start. It's really easy to do
once you learn the basics that are needed.</tip>

Thanks again for the mention, Rudy!

Warmly,
Shirley

--
Shirley E. Kaiser, M.A.,  SKDesigns  mailto:skaiser1 at skdesigns.com
Website Design, Development      http://www.skdesigns.com/
WebsiteTips: Design Resources  http://www.websitetips.com/
Brainstorms and Raves  http://www.brainstormsandraves.com/




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