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Re: Blatant abuse of the term 'accessibility'

for

From: Steven Henderson
Date: Apr 1, 2010 8:18AM

Nancy,

On the basis that using the keyboard requires about 100 key presses before I
know where I am on the whitehouse homepage (and most of these are main menu
links), links are clearly not designed to be accessible, outright.

As for keyword stuffing, the whitehouse footer is clearly designed
sympathetically to the website as a sitemap. Even if this was to help SEO in
any way, it has clearly been designed to appear useful to visual site
visitors. I honestly don't see why in addition, they could not make the main
menu work for keyboard use though ... that is just laziness.

The example I provided however, used keywords that clearly have nothing to
do with the aiding the user, otherwise why would they choose different link
text to those in the main menu of the content area (which are clear and best
suited to visual users), push the list a mile down the page and visually
present it as a separate afterthought by retaining none of the design and
styling of the main content area. And then using 'accessibility' as a
leading heading which only a search engine wouldn't consider out of context
of the rest of the website, and thus not flag it as suspiscious.

Steven



-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Nancy Johnson
Sent: 01 April 2010 13:46
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Blatant abuse of the term 'accessibility'

Along with abuse is also tremendous misunderstanding. I'm working on
a site that the jquery's that came to us were not keyboard accessible.
There was one, however, the dropdown menus in the global navigation
came to us screen reader accessible.

Many companies also believe that if they run their favorite
accessibility validator then they feel their site is accessible.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/ puts a sitemap of their site in the footer
because their drop-down menus are not keyboard accessible, or at least
they weren't in the past. Would you consider it a help the keyboard
user? or keyword stuffing?

Nancy

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 7:32 AM, Geof Collis < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Hi Steve
>
> I'm not sure what can be done but up here in Ontario with the new law
> governing website accessibility expected soon people who have no
> business calling themselves web accessibility professionals/experts
> are popping up like dandelions.
>
> I expect a lot of Companies are going to be taken to the cleaners.
>
> cheers
>
> Geof
>
>
> At 05:10 AM 4/1/2010, you wrote:
>>I've seen a worrying increase of websites blatantly abusing the term
>>'accesibility' in the current climate in which we try so hard to
encourage.
>>An example of what I am talking about is using accessibility as a vehicle
to
>>validate an almost worser evil such as keyword-stuffing SEO tactics
(perhaps
>>due to genuine misunderstanding, or perhaps not) like the following
example
>>(observe the heading 'Links for Accessibility' that introduces the
so-called
>>accessibility links, below the visually-obvious main content):
>>http://alturl.com/8xzu
>>
>>
>>
>>What do other people think can be done to stop people doing this? And more
>>importantly, encourage them and their clients to consider this distasteful
>>practice. It is not accepted in the real-world, so why should we accept it
>>online.
>>
>>