Thoughts

Accessibility: Do it properly or not at all!

With a public service mandate you would expect the BBC to push the boundaries of accessibility and ensure their sites content & functionality is available to as many people as possible.  But upon review of their site we found that sometimes they do not live up to this ideal. 

Whilst discussing ideas related to 'Email to a friend' functionality on websites and the potential danger of this service being used to generate spam emails through your server; I decided to look at how the BBC has overcome this problem, after all they are supposed to be an accessibility exemplar.

It turns out that they still use it on all their pages

So far, so good …. you click on the link & you get a pop-up to fill out:

The BBC has implemented the 'captcha' functionality to reduce the number of potential spam emails generated from a piece of software 'hitting this page'. The Alpha/number image is automatically generated and presented making it hard for a spam engines to comprehend.

Great, however this poses an accessibility conundrum. If you have poor vision or use a screen reader, you will most likely be unable to comprehend the image and therefore render the functionality useless. Naturally the image doesn't have 'alt text' associated with it (if this were in place spam engines would also be able to read this and submit the reference from the image into the box).

The way the BBC and many others get around this, is to have a 'listen' option which allows users that can not see the image to have the Alpha/number image in audio. This is best practice and is good to see, however when you press the 'listen' option, this happens:

A quick time (or similar) player is launched and the Alpha/number image is read out. This means that a visually disabled user now knows the Alpha/number reference that needs to be entered into the security box. The only problem is that since the player is placed over the pop-up and since the pop-up does not have any forward or back buttons associated with it, the initial form is now not available.

After trying to get back to the form I found that the only way to do this is to close the box and open it up again with the initial 'E-mail this to a friend' link. The problem here is that a new security number will be generated and the visually disabled user is back to square one.

I applaud the BBC for their use of functionality like audio & 'captcha' to help visually disabled users access their sites functionality. But poorly implemented accessibility functionality makes it all the more frustrating for a visually disabled user.

If you are going to make your site accessible, architect, implement and test the solution before you deploy, where possible always engage and test with users with the disability you are trying to support.

Don't make excuses, just do it properly.  To see how we solve this problem and ensure that are sites are always 100% accessible email us. 

Published on: Dec 10, 2009 by Anton McCoy