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Re: How to give a short accessibility improvement summary on a very complex and messy webpage

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Sep 2, 2011 3:27PM

There is indeed a small carousel containing five items that autorotate and a
'hero' image that cycles through a number of alternatives, each of which
links to a different page. Apart from that, the page is totally static, and
I would not say that it is complex or fancy at all. That said, there are a
number of issues.

They have used tabindex attributes on a few elements so that the login form
receives focus when the page loads. This form comes after all the important
content in the source order, and a screen reader user may not understand
that they need to navigate backwards to find the content.

Parts of the page are marked up well with headings, lists and fieldsets, but
the last quarter of the page contains no semantic structure at all.

The "um okkur" and "English" links are commented out, which is why you don't
see them on screen. There is nothing wrong with that.

You will probably find the page easy to use if you turn off JavaScript. The
links in the carousel are still accessible, and all you lose are the 'hero'
images and links, which disappear completely. That ought to be fixed.

The JavaScript should not slow down your screen reader because there is very
little of it and it is not doing much. It may be possible to optimise it to
use less CPU. Dynamic content like that often causes screen readers' virtual
object model to become corrupted but this is less of an issue in newer
versions.

I personally would not use tabindex but I understand why they have done so.
If they remove the tabindex, optimise the JavaScript and add some semantic
structure to the latter part of the page, this page could be very easy to
use with a screen reader and very accessible in general.

Steve Green
Test Partners Ltd