The Labour Party in New Zealand has a “Make your own billboard” website. This is apparently en effort to get people involved and a start campaigning for the upcoming elections. Except that the website is not accessible to many people with disabilities. Or people using smartphones.
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Paralympics NZ – When Web Professionals Don’t Do Their Job Right
It seems wrong that a disability-related organisation would have a website that is not accessible. One really shouldn’t cut out their primary market. It tends to happen when the organisation relies on "professionals" who don’t really have any idea what they are doing. And the organisation just knows that they want a website. Often, they don’t even know enough to realise they should ask about accessibility.
Alt Attributes Can Be Tricky
I was looking at a site last night. Ok, I looked at a lot of sites yesterday, but had a specific look at one. They had done the “right” thing and declared an alt attribute to some images. But giving the site a whirl with images turned off, anyone could quickly see that their choice of alt text was not particularly helpful.
Respecting WCAG does not Ensure Accessibility
It is not only knowledge of the accessibility guidelines that is important. One must understand them as well, and understand what are the underlying issues. If we go about implementing each guideline without understanding why we’re doing what we do, we risk ending up with pages that are meeting the guidelines, but that are not accessible!