phpwcms Support Forum

it's flash, kind of snitched from iTunes - but, it's great!

http://www.rene-lezard.com/

macangelo

It certainly is visually impressive. But the RNIB gave the River Island clothing chain a lot of bad publicity over the total inaccessibility of their last Flash website.

There is no alternative content for this site, which is a requirement of the Disability Discrimination Act in the UK. I would have thought most EU countries would have similar acts in place.

Peekay wrote: There is no alternative content for this site, which is a requirement of the Disability Discrimination Act in the UK. I would have thought most EU countries would have similar acts in place.

No, they don't (to my knowledge), only in the UK is that a mandatory, in Germany you have the "impressum" and in some other countries other things but there is not (atm) a EU rule for website compliancy (should be though, imho). Like take the best practises from each country (and, let's face it ... it would also mean a lot of work to all of us )

Cheers

I think the DDA is trying to reinforce the point that retailers using the internet as an advertising medium have responsibilities that go beyond winning kudos for an impressive website. To be fair to River Island, they had attempted to use a common data source to power the Flash site and also an HTML version, but the HTML code it generated was inaccessible.

Flash designers do have to do some extra work, but it's not much work compared to the effort that must have gone into this site. The basic requirement is to have some alternative content that works in a text browser like Lynx. It does not have to mirror the site content exactly, but it should contain SIGNIFICANT content. You should at the least provide some contact details so that disabled people can obtain further information by telephone, or make contact using an adapted email application.

My web design company adopt the attitude that if an HTML site, or the alternative content for a Flash site works in Lynx it IS accessible. Lynx can be used with a screen-reader, a keyboard only and a pointing device other than a mouse. And it is FREE.

Adding a 'Text Version' option to the splash screen for this site and putting together a couple of HTML pages would have done the job.

PHPWCMS sites (provided you use 'ALT' descriptions for images) work very well in Lynx.

Thanks all for your comments. I agree with your basic principles I hear or mean to hear: great design is great but usability comes first! On a second view - after my first enthusiasm - I find the navigation in some parts improvable.

Regarding DDA - I don't know about an European law but Germany has a "Verordnung zur Schaffung barrierefreier Informationstechnik nach dem Behindertengleichstellungsgesetz" (http://217.160.60.235/BGBL/bgbl1f/bgbl102s2654.pdf) which basically says scripts should not be dependent of input devices, use alt-texts for images and other media and don't use tables for design. It's mandatory for government sites.

More Info you find at the "Aktionsbündnis für barrierefreie Informationstechnik" (http://www.abi-projekt.de/startseite/) and the portal of "wob11" which stands for "Web ohne Barrieren - gemäß Paragraph 11 des Bundesbehindertengleichstellungsgesetzes" (http://www.wob11.de/gute_bsp.html).

While we are at it - info about Lynx are here: http://lynx.isc.org/lynx2.8.5/lynx2-8-5 ... _main.html - does anybody know where to get the Mac-beta that should be out?

Best
Macangelo

macangelo wrote:...does anybody know where to get the Mac-beta that should be out?

Hi,
some additional links:

Mac
Lynx text web browser 2.8.6u
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/u ... owser.html

You could get Lynx running under Unix on Mac (FreeBSD) instead:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?qu ... stype=name


Lynx Viewer
http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html

Greetz
Jensensen

If you're not using Mac OSX 10.4 you can get the version of Lynx that runs under OSX 10.3.9 below. It works as a terminal application.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/31677