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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