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Re: Blatant abuse of the term 'accessibility'

for

From: Nancy Johnson
Date: Apr 1, 2010 7:45AM

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.
>>
>>