Australia Orders Olympic Web Site Accessible to Blind

Julian Assange writes "An article in The Age reports that the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission has ordered the Sydney 2000 Olympics organisers (SOCOG) to use ALT tags on all images and image map links on its web site. IBM who was contracted to develop the site, claims it needs a cool $2 million and a year to retrofit ALT tags to the entire site, including real-time score pages. But Simon Moran of the Public Access Internet Advocacy Centre says the modifications would cost only between $30,000 and $40,000 to implement. It goes without saying that changes would have cost $0 if IBM had correctly used ALT tags the first time around."

CAST's Analysis of the homepage

For those who care, CAST.org has a neat tool called Bobby which can analyse web pages and report their 'readability' for the visually impared.

Please head on to http://www.cast.org/bobby/ [cast.org]

type in http://www.olympics.com/eng/home.html and send the request for processing.

Interesting to note that, at this stage, Bobby does not report any automatically detected Priority-1 errors. But thats just for this specific page.

Similar AOL classaction

Isn't this similar to the classaction suit that was (or is being) brought against AOL.

Maybe the suit is only in the proposal stages...

Re:Disgusting...

I don't think it's an issue of just not having alt tags, the design seems to favour browsers that render images and no alternative navigation. One example is the world map, it's an image map with no alternative menu in text, which is pretty poor to say the least. Surely someone from IBM showed their designs off to the committee? Shouldn't it have at this point objections were raised? I would guess it would be easier to build a data driven text based site from scratch rather than attempt to modify everything that's already in place.

What IBM should do

is release yet another browser that will have an AI engine built into it that would recognize the context and the picture in any gif or a jpg image file and would then use more AI to generate a meaningfull sentence stating the purpose of the picture and its context + all the extra info needed for the blind people, and the browser should be navigated by voice. Now that is a work for a year and more (image recognition has being in development for the past three decades, human speech recognition for the past four decades.)

Re:Website Accessible to Blind?

My "registered blind" girlfriend (who can see enough to survive without a white stick or anything) always uses Lynx (in 80x25 text mode on a 21" monitor with her face 8" from the screen.

Therefore she only uses the ALT tags, as there aren't any images, and can't be any images.

However for the truly blind, the web is often "viewed" using a speech synthesiser.
There are also Braille interfaces too, but they are a mechanical add-on, but a speech interface is simply software and a standard soundcard.

Watching her browse, I've learned that "Image 384x240 32K" is a totally useless ALT tag.

Phil

Takes a bit more than ALT tags....

It takes more than just ALT tags to make a site readable to someone using a screen reader. If you doubt that, just fire up trusty old lynx and try to navigate most sites, even if they have ALT tags.

Web site tools (like Front Page) are HORRIBLE at producing pages that can be read by these special browsers and screen readers. I tend to code all of my pages by hand just to make them usable. It's possible to have a visually appealing site and still make it usable in text-only mode without having to have an entirely separate "text only" track through the site.

I think this is "a good thing" personally. Force people to think about what HTML is really for, structuring the document, move style to stylesheets where they belong, and stop just making up a page and if it looks good in IE, publish it...

So architects don't have to design to code?

What you are saying is that if I contract with a building firm for a new house, unless I specify in the contract the house doesn't have to comply with the building code for my area of residence?

I'd like to think that the wires will comply with electrical code whether or not I put it in writing, and that the plumbing will meet the plumbing code whether I put it in writing or not.

Design firms are responsible for finding and understanding applicable law. This is usually known by the name 'due diligence' and is not an incredibly new concept.

This is the exact same situation, not only is the ALT tag reccomended by the standard, its quite likely that making the web site accessible to non-sighted people is the law in Australia (otherwise there would be no lawsuit).

Given the presentation that IBM makes of its solutions (being professional) I think that they deserve to lose money on this one. If IBM had intentionally made the sight viewable by IE only, there would be screaming from virtually everyone at slashdot. Systemically overlooking people with eye problems is something that should never happen from a 'professional' web-designer.

Re:Disgusting...

Yes, you can build web sites that are interesting and full of eye-candy, yet still be fully features-compliant such that it will work with all browsers [*] on all platforms, for disabled users, for cel-phones, for text-only display, or whatever other situation that we have yet to envision. It doesn't require a lot of extra work from the start, and is probably easier to develop and maintain. You can still use CSS, Java, JS, Flash, or other plug in features as well. This is the whole point of HTML - the browser, whatever it may be, decides how to render what you wrote, ignoring tags as necessary to make sense for that particular enviornment (e.g. ignoring in text browsers).

99% of broken sites out there can be easily fixed with ALT tags and text menus for image maps. Most other problems stem from JS-only navigation. If you want to add eye candy with images not needed to get the content of the site, ALT="" is quite valid and will not disrupt a page on lynx or other text browsers. There's plenty more easy accessibility tips that you can add, and it's much easier to add them at the start than the end, but even completed web sites can add them easily.

[*] There are browser problems where the HTML rendering is coding completely wrong, unfortunately, and one had to code around it. CSS on IE3 and NS4 are two good examples: it's just broken yet functioning in IE3, and for no good reason, you have to have JS enabled to use CSS in NS4, and your CSS has to be whitespaced just right lest you run into problems.

META Information

I see some point here: It's easy to put ALT tags everywhere, but it fairly complex to get the information what is on the pictures.

What do we have: pictures with something on it that need to be described. Where do we get this informatinon? Form the filename? No.

From a database? Yes - If they have the information at all ...

Whatever ... this is not worth 2 million and certainly takes not a year of development :-)

Re:2M$ is justified.

Blockquoth the poster:

Like a water-proof roof for an house, ALT tags are mandatory for a "usable" web site.

Well, that's the rub, isn't it? Does everyone agree that Web sites have to have ALT tags so that they're accessible to the blind? Just reading the reaction on slashdot -- a self-selected technically knowledgable group -- the answer seems to be "no". There are a number of people who question the point of this. (I am not saying they're right; I'm just pointing out that they exist.)

To use your example: After the house is down, you walk through and notice that the doorknobs are not made of solid gold like you wanted. Can you go to the architect and say, "Well, that should have been included."? Of course not. Doorknobs are expected; solid gold ones are not.

Personally, I don't view accessibility by the blind -- especially for a major international site like the Olympics -- to be the same sort of frill as a gold doorknob. But the question is: What sort of features are expected by nearly everyone when you say "I'll make you a web site"? I think it can argued that accessibility, sadly, is not one of those features.

IBM should be smart enough to do this for free or at some nominal cost, just for the PR. But it's not clear they should be forced to do so.

IBM's last Olympics

IBM isn't doing the web sites for the Olympics after Sydney, so they no longer have any reason to play nice with these people. They can take the attitude "it wasn't in the contract", and not have to worry about who they piss off. I bet if they were still doing the Olympics, you would have never heard of this story.

It is the law, else, there would be no law suit

boy case opined:

It has nothing to do with any laws or codes.

Let's go back and look at the article.

SOCOG was ordered to make changes to its website before the Olympics start after the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission upheld a complaint against the site by a blind man today.

Bruce Maguire lodged the complaint because large parts of the site were inaccessible to blind people.

The commission today ruled in Mr Maguire's favor and ordered SOCOG to make changes to its website before September 15.

It found SOCOG had breached the Disability Discrimination Act and has ordered it to use ALT text on all images and image map links on its site. [my emphasis]

What he have here is the finding that SOCOG's web sight breached one of the law's of Australia. Hence, IBM, as part of due diligence in their bid for designing the site, should have taken accessibility into consideration. Hence, my opinion that the retrofit to make the site comply with the law should come out of IBM's pocket.

Web designers are responsible for knowing the laws that impact their craft, just as plumbers and electricians are responsible for knowing building regulations.

Usability 101

It's not just ALT tags - there are other things wrong with the Olympics site as well. For example, the bogus implementation of frames, making it impossible to link to many pages directly.

This is all really basic stuff, Usability 101 [dannyreviews.com], and there's no excuse for getting it wrong on a really high-profile site. Heck, they ought to have a full-time usability expert for a site like that!

Danny [danny.oz.au]

HREOC can't make binding rulings

The commission needs to take its rulings to the Federal Court if they want to get them enforced. At this stage, as the article says, it's not binding.

And yes, it was moronic not to be using tags in the first place.